Since 2014, the Friends of the Museum Ostwall e.V. have awarded the MO_Art Prize "Dada, Fluxus and the Consequences" annually to artists who work in the tradition of Dada and Fluxus. The jury, consisting of museum experts and representatives of the Friends of the MO, selected the conceptual artist, who lives in Karlsruhe, from a total of 9 nominations in a three-hour session.
Hannah Cooke deals with systems, regulations and role concepts. She understands how to read cultural systems and recode them into her own aesthetic formal language - film, photo, sculpture, performance. Medium and material become statements of their own and address social imbalances as well as gaps in the art and culture business. Between seriousness and irony, clear facts and exaggeration, the artist finds strategies to create access to her works and to involve visitors - sometimes offensively, sometimes passively - in her works.
Hannah Cooke was born in Munich in 1986. Her artistic works have been shown at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, the Badischer Kunstverein, the Kunstverein Freiburg, Mimosa House London and CAFA Beijing in China, among others. She studied Media Art at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe and Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam.
The MO_Art Prize is associated with the purchase of an artwork for the collection of the Museum Ostwall, which will be presented in an accompanying exhibition in the MO_Schaufenster from 11 September 2022. The prize of 20,000 euros is donated in equal parts by the Kulturbetriebe der Stadt Dortmund and the Friends of the Museum Ostwall.
The award ceremony and opening of the exhibition in the MO_Schaufenster is scheduled for 11 September at 11.30 am in the Museum Ostwall in the Dortmunder U.
"With our Fluxus collection, Hannah Cooke connects the examination of themes of everyday life. In one of her works, for example, she examines the lack of representation of women's personalities in public commemorative culture, or in a performance she reflects on the effects of contact restrictions in the context of the Covid 19 pandemic on social interaction. Her critical examination of the current art business and, for example, its - supposed - incompatibility with her role as a mother can also be interpreted as a contemporary response to the demand propagated by George Maciunas in his Fluxus manifesto to 'promote living art [...] promote non-art reality'.
"We look forward to working with her to select an artwork for the MO_Collection and are excited to hear her ideas for the exhibition in the MO_Showcase."
*Dr. Nicole Grothe, Head of Collection, Museum Ostwall
"The overarching theme of systemic critique of the cult of genius, artist ego, hierarchies in the art world, authorship and the idea of achievement has led to the selection of the alert analyst Hannah Cooke. She gets to the bottom of double standards and we are more than happy to choose her as our 9th Laureate." Benjamin Sieber, Chairman of the Friends of the Museum Ostwall e.V.
