SOLO AWARD WINNER 2019

Solo Prize Winner 2019 - Samaneh Roghani (IR)

Artist talk with the Solo Prize winner on Wednesday, February 6 at 17:00 in Kunsthal Charlottenborg's cinema (free admission). The talk will be held in English and moderated by Thomas Lindvig, visual artist and Chairman of the Board of the Charlottenborg Foundation.

The jury has chosen the Iranian artist Samaneh Roghani (born 1984) as the recipient of this year's Solo Award for the work Barzakh (Limbo). Roghani has created a particularly significant work that is both innovative in its use of media (video, sculpture, installation) and, not least, capable of making the artist's personal story touching, relevant and important. A unanimous jury was captivated by her ability to work formally and spatially and at the same time link this convincingly and invariably to the statement and content of the work.

The artist says of the work: "This piece is about emigration and the fact that a person like me can leave his country for a better life and the freedom to protest inequality and actually end up overcoming the fear of doing just that."

The gripping narrative is powerful because Roghani manages to translate her own private story into something universal and essential. And she does this through a work where the viewer experiences the theme close to their own body: Through the long corridor where our shadows are part of the video image of people walking. We pass a series of ropes (with eerie associations of imprisonment and execution), but we also pass by and on the other side. It is a work that works immersively with space. Precisely because it involves the viewer's movement as part of its temporality, the thought-provoking and sinister side of the work only slowly dawns on us. It creeps under our skin, so to speak, through the sensory passage. It has a powerful effect.

The work exemplifies the best of the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition. It works cleverly and confidently across the media of video, sculpture and architecture in the form of a spatial installation, while the current relevance and sincerity of the story touches us through the artist's sensitivity and sense of the aesthetic field. It deserves all the awards it can get.

Anna Krogh, Curator, Brandts - Museum of Art and Visual Culture