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07.02.2022 #kulturlxnews #photography #residency #visual arts

Lisa Kohl, winner of the 2022 Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin residency

© Marie Capesius

Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg, continuing the commitment of the Fonds culturel national to its partners, has taken over the Künstlerhaus Bethanien residency in Berlin and offers to visual artists a six-month research and creation residency, based on a call for applications open in December 2021.

The residency program is a platform for artists from all over the world. The winner will have the opportunity to work on and realize a project for a defined period of time and to immerse themselves in the Berlin art scene. The residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien will provide an opportunity to network with the local art scene, contributing
to the development of the recipient’s professional career.

The committee, made up Claudine Hemmer (ministère de la Culture), Clément Minighetti (MUDAM), and Mike Bourscheid (artist, residency laureate 2021), examined the 8 applications received and made recommendations to the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, which then took the final decision. Following this selection process, the residency was
awarded to Lisa Kohl for her project SHUTDOWN DREAMS | ANGELS IN FALL.

Statement of the jury
The jury recognize the coherence of Lisa Kohl’s proposal, which is in line with her overall artistic vocabulary and purpose, but also with a residency in Berlin that offers many possibilities for exploration. Lisa Kohl has integrated all the issues of this residency, wishing to take advantage, in the writing of her own work, of the Berlin socio-political context, along with her artistic history. The jury considered that Lisa Kohl’s project, both precise and floating, playing on anchoring and dis-anchoring in space, allows for free interpretation, particularly in her ability to go beyond the photographic medium and its issues. The artist intends to mix her work with the Berlin art scene in order to give it more body, to deepen his research by confronting it with another view. It is this openness in a project that has been constructed that the jury wanted to encourage. Moreover, the residency seems to come at a good time in the career of Lisa Kohl who has benefited from a good international and national visibility in recent months (Rencontres d’Arles, Prix Steichen). This residency could open up other possibilities in terms of networking and dissemination of her work, perhaps with the Kunstvereine.

Statement of Künstlerhaus Bethanien
We are delighted to declare Lisa Kohl as the next Luxembourg scholarship holder at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. The artist has a very individual, clear, expressive and yet subtle visual language. We are particularly convinced by Lisa Kohl’s photo series Shelter in its combination of performance and photographic representation. The series Passage, which she presents similarly in light boxes on concrete pedestals, also combines an outstanding photographic aesthetic with important subject matter. The artist confidently and coherently chooses a wide variety of media, including video and sound, to convey her respective themes.

About Lisa Kohl
Lisa Kohl was born in 1988 in Luxembourg. She lives and works between Luxembourg and Germany. Her work takes various forms, such as collaborations with performing arts, photo series, sculptural and audiovisual installations. Lisa Kohl holds a Bachelor’s degree in plastic, visual and spatial Arts from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels La Cambre, in Brussels, and graduated with honours (2017) from the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule in Halle, Germany. In 2021, she was laureate of the Aide à la création et diffusion en photographie grant from the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (LU) and is nominated for the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff grant, Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (D). She was chosen by the jury of Lët’z Arles to participate in the Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles in 2020-2021. She was nominated for the Edward Steichen Prize in 2019 and has already completed a residency in Los Angeles in 2018 at Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e.V. She describes her artistic position as follows: “I am interested in the relationship between artistic creation and social reality. I create images for subjects that touch me closely, making the big gap between socio-political commitment and personal visual language. To do this, I go directly to the field and seek to get closer to the margins and precarious living conditions. […] My artistic research [is marked] by the strong points of flight and exile, presence and absence, place and non-place. […] Originating from a real context, a space of experience is opened up, which gives voice to the people I meet and to the theme to be problematised. The interventions, sculptures and images related to different contexts refer to our
collective memory, which is poetically questioned in my works in a dialogical mode.”