SOLO AWARD WINNER 2017

This year's winner Rodo Abdirahman

Since its inception 160 years ago, it has been an objective of Kunsthal Charlottenborg to give a considerable number of artists the opportunity to show their works in a wider context. There are high ceilings in the original exhibition halls, also in the transferred sense, when the exhibition again this year invites experienced as well as inexperienced artists to exhibit. A flexible exhibition forum that celebrates the idea, craftsmanship and potential – all in a format that facilitates the artistic vision as something fluid and something that takes great shape outside or between so-called established art directions and schools. Across national and geographical boundaries, autodidact and unpredictable expressions are pirate and unpredictable – expressions that are at once universal and at once extremely personal, statements whose topicality lies precisely in allowing itself to be articulated as the invisible transition between the collectively interesting and then an outriding, embarrassing self-awareness. Here lies the potential and here lies also the effort that the jury has chosen this year to highlight and reward as the winner among a total of five finalists.

The young Rodo Abdirahman video work 'Recipe (the recipe)' places itself precisely in the middle of all the chairs and draws his artistic strength in the choice of genre and in the courage not to moralize, comment on or even take responsibility for the presentation of the artwork as a work of art. A young woman folds her clothes over and over again, takes them off and on endlessly, all the while chantingly talking rather than herself about what she should and especially should not. 'You have to hang out with the right people, see the right art exhibitions, drink the right bubbles from Netto.' The fine girl's voice devours the endings in her own sentences, hastily on, uncertain but purposeful. The rhythm, despite the fact that the scene is filmed in the neon lights of a laundromat – the sympathy grows with us, well helped by the viewer's desire to tolerate the narrator's nervousness. Raw, dispensing, unsorted and hugely fragile, a monologue is performed, we hear the inner voice, but it speaks for all of us when it portrays the confusion surrounding the best staging of the meta-i on instagram and facebook or the fear of stepping wrong by going to the wrong art prescriptions.

The jury rewards Rodo Abdirahman for her artistic courage in leaving the statement unadorned. For her raw style, her unedited portrait of our time as a paradoxical mix of extreme self-promotion and subsequent humiliation if this misses. About the carefully choreographed way of life on social media and, in fact, about the pursuit of belonging and recognition through the seemingly immediate actions – only to keep the fear of being an outsider from life. In this case, an internal dialogue that goes deeper than the fact that this year's finalist Rodo Abdirahman is of a different ethnic background than Danish and resides in Denmark. The video surprises in its complete opt-out of direct commenting on any kind of integration problem. Instead, it focuses on dilemmas that arise on, for example, the need to create a new environment. Instagram or on the art scene – what art openings should you go to and not, should I wear a scarf or not?

We reward Rodo Abdirahman for the potential shown in an artistically promising video production and hope the prize will generate further attention to the young artist's work and will motivate her to continue to develop as an artist.

By Line Clausen Pedersen