SOLO AWARD WINNER 2018

Solo Award Winner 2018: Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl

The winner of the 2018 Solo Jury Prize is Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl for the video works ODE and NO OZONE. Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl works in various media, but centers on film, sound, music and photography. These elements are often mixed into complex and energetic works that revolve around memory, trauma and fantasy.

In ODE, Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl has created a video work where the story is told through a powerful combination of horror aesthetics, music and documentary film.

In ODE, the main characters are played by Kim Mejdahl himself and his close family, his mother and three sisters. In a series of choreographed scenes, they take turns performing songs based on their experience of living with an alcoholic husband and father - a man destined to be killed, pushed down a staircase.

As Kim Mejdahl and his family evoke collective memories of violence and abuse, the viewer is drawn into a universe where the line between fiction and reality is blurred, where family memories are fictionalized by music video aesthetics and chainsaw massacre moments. As a viewer, uncertainty arises as to whether the story being told is true, whether the abuse really happened, and whether the photographic material of the dead body presented to us is real or fake?

The same mix of personal experience, aggression and vulnerability seen in ODE can be felt in the energetic animated film NO OZONE.

NO OZONE is an animation consisting of 2448 individual drawings scanned and assembled into a surreal and absurd cartoon music video. NO OZONE, the first animation by the artist, shows Kim Mejdahl himself as a cartoon character dancing and singing (to self-composed music) through a barren desert landscape. As in ODE, references to death seem to challenge the human ability to suppress trauma, to literally and metaphorically bury the unpleasant and other unwelcome emotions - emotions that are doomed to haunt you. In NO OZONE, they come in the form of an evil-eyed snake that morphs in and out of the artist's body like an evil spirit.

The Jury Solo Award 2018 goes to Kim Mejdahl for his courage to let his own personal story be at the forefront of his work without reducing it to pure subjective therapy. In ODE and NO OZONE, he has created two video works that both have a visual, emotional and physical impact on the viewer. The jury was fascinated by this energetic universe whose intense personal expression blurs the boundaries between art and life. The private is not sacred in Kim Mejdahl's universe, as his work focuses on the childhood traumas that most people avoid discussing. Kim Mejdahl's extraordinarily honest work, and the intense effort put into creating the film ODE as well as the three-minute animation NO OZONE, Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl has produced two works that for the jury were unforgettable in their intense, sickening and powerful exploration of the healing power of revenge and the personal treatment of trauma.