SOLO AWARD WINNER 2017

Winner of the year Rodo Abdirahman

Since its inception 160 years ago, Kunsthal Charlottenborg's goal has been to give a significant number of artists the opportunity to show their work in a larger context. There is a high ceiling in the original exhibition halls, also in a figurative sense, when the exhibition again this year invites both experienced and inexperienced artists to exhibit. A flexible exhibition forum that celebrates the idea, the craft and the potential - all in a format that facilitates the artistic vision as something fluid and something that largely takes shape outside or between so-called established art movements and schools. Across national and geographical borders, self-taught and unpredictable expressions emerge - expressions that are at once universal and at the same time extremely personal, statements whose topicality lies precisely in being formulated as the invisible transition between the collectively interesting and a revealing, embarrassing self-awareness. Here lies the potential and here lies the effort that the jury has chosen to highlight and reward as the winner among a total of five finalists this year.

The young Rodo Abdirahman's video work 'Recipe (Recipe)' places itself in the middle of all the chairs and draws its artistic strength from the rejection of genre and the courage not to moralize, comment or even take responsibility for the presentation of the artwork as an artwork. A young woman folds her clothes again and again, putting them on and taking them off endlessly, all the while chanting to herself about what she should and especially should not do: 'You should hang out with the right people, see the right art exhibitions, drink the right bubbles from Netto'. The delicate girl's voice eats up the endings of her own sentences, hurriedly, uncertainly, but purposefully. The rhythm is catchy, despite the fact that the scene is filmed in the neon lights of a laundromat - the sympathy grows on us, helped by the viewer's desire to tolerate the narrator's nervousness. Raw, exposing, unsorted and extremely fragile, a monologue is performed, we hear the inner voice, but it speaks for all of us when it portrays the confusion around the best staging of the meta-self on Instagram and Facebook or the fear of making the wrong move by going to the wrong art receptions.

The jury rewards Rodo Abdirahman for her artistic courage to leave 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 it slips. About the carefully choreographed way of life on social media and in reality, about the search for belonging and recognition through seemingly immediate actions - just to keep the fear of being an outsider from life. In this case, an inner dialog that goes deeper than the fact that this year's finalist Rodo Abdirahman is of a non-Danish ethnic background and lives in Denmark. The video surprises in its complete rejection of direct commentary on any kind of integration issues. Instead, it focuses on dilemmas that arise on Instagram or on the art scene - which art openings to go to and which not to go to, should I wear a scarf or not?

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

By Line Clausen Pedersen