As a singular exception, the 2013 scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists was awarded to two artists, Verena Seibt and Clea Stracke

Jury statement
Verena Seibt and Clea Stracke (both living in Cologne) work together as an artist duo from 2006-2016. Their artistic research starts with real (urban, social, architectural or institutional) spaces and – in a thoroughly humorous and ironic way – brings to light the buried truths of these spaces. Their video installation Und das Schiff fährt (And the ship sails), which they presented in 2009 for their graduation, deals with the architecture of the Coop Himmelb(l)au art academy building as well as with teaching and the “essence of an artist”. In the video, the alienation technique of the film medium transforms the building of the Munich Art Academy into a ship on the high seas at the mercy of the waves: “The real front is reinterpreted as a fictional backdrop – and in this metaphor of the ship sailing on the high seas, it refers to the highly real internal structures of the academy,” point out the artists. Their proposed project Because I don’t love you any more will examine various separation processes at the recycling yard. The video intends to change the view of an everyday place by dramatically exaggerating tragic moments of separation.

Verena Seibt (*1980 in Dachau) und Clea Stracke (*1982 in Berlin-Tempelhof) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 2001 – 2008 and worked together as an artist duo until 2016. In their subtle manoeuvres, the two create imaginary spaces by groping, wondering, dissecting their way into real places, balancing their finds on the fine line between fiction and reality. Film and installation are the artists’ central media for creating space-consuming scenarios.

Information about the artists on their website
further information here and here

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2015 was awarded to Céline Berger.

Members of the three-person jury were Dr. Inke Arns (Director of HMKV, Dortmund), Thomas Thiel (former Director of Kunstverein Bielefeld) and Denise Ritter (artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2012). The jury selected the scholarship holder from 55 applications.

Jury statement
On the one hand, Céline Berger is interested in how precarious working conditions are inscribed in (visual) language (Employees, Release, both 2010). On the other hand, the artist examines the ways in which language is used to achieve personal career goals within the company. For this so-called “business coaches” make use of a variety of models and conversation techniques: Neuro-linguistic programming, systemic constellation, transactional analysis, emotional intelligence. The relationship between “trainer” (coach) and “client” (coachee) represents a narrative universe that is particularly interesting for the artist: It is a framework within which “stories of the world of work” are told. Céline Berger weaves these stories, which she finds for example in the case studies of the Harvard Business Review, into poetic narratives (e.g. in Rare birds in these lands, La Ronde, both 2013). The artist, whose view was doubtless sharpened by her stay in the Netherlands, succeeds in creating an extremely detailed analysis of the current corporate world, which at some moments is quite frightening. The jury is impressed by the accurate work of this artist, who manages to distil artistic reflections on the present, which is increasingly shaped by economic thinking, from the functional language of our working world. The work Ballade, which was produced as part of the scholarship, was shown in 2018 at Dortmunder U and Temporary Gallery, Cologne. The screenings were organised by the medienwerk.nrw office.

Céline Berger (*1973 in Saint martin d’Hères, France) explores the medium of language. Her artistic work focuses on today’s working and business world.

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2016 was awarded to Vera Drebusch.

Members of the three-person jury were Dr. Inke Arns (Director of HMKV Hartware Medienkunstverein, Dortmund), Thomas Thiel (former Director of Kunstverein Bielefeld) and Céline Berger (artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2015, Cologne). The jury selected the scholarship holders from 43 applications.

Jury statement
The artist Vera Drebusch, who was born in Herdecke in 1986 and lives in Cologne, deals with contemporary history in her photographic, text and media works and updates them in the form of personal memories. In the photographic work Route (2014), for example, Vera Drebusch addresses the expulsion of her grandmother after the Second World War. The artist cycled the 300 km route from Poland via Czechoslovakia to Germany and projects this route as a Google map on her décolleté: her grandmother’s escape route appears as blue veins on her own skin. Hostage Radio (2014) was created during a stay in Colombia in 2013. Every Saturday, Colombia’s largest radio station broadcasts messages from family members of the many hijacked people to the kidnapped in the jungle from midnight until 6:00 the next day. The installation is made up of a radio station and a world receiver from which a text written and spoken by Vera Drebusch can be heard – and all this is placed in front of a piece of Levanto Rosso (blood marble) illuminated from behind. Vera Drebusch also works with the methods of condensation and visualisation in other projects. Her new project, to be realised within the scholarship of the state of NRW for a female media artist in 2016, is entitled Die Höhle des Löwen (Lion´s Cave).
Lion´s Cave, Mixed Media Installation (Diaprojektion, in Stahl gerahmte Bilder, 50 x 70cm), 1987/2006/2016: In an autobiographical work, Vera Drebusch traces her relationship with a childhood friend. The two grew up together, almost like siblings, but he later followed a completely different path. For eleven years he was a member of the far-right scene; he served two prison sentences and was recently able to leave the scene. The photos from the past thirty years have been thoroughly edited, his face as well as the tattoos all over his body have been retouched and erased for the sake of anonymity. The attempt at rapprochement is documented through quotes that have been handwritten and projected as a slide show directly onto the wall. The gallery of St. Peter serves as an exhibition space. (Mario Müller)

Vera Drebusch (1986 in Herdecke) lives and works in Hamburg, graduated in photography in Dortmund and followed this up with studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá and as a guest at the Bremen University of the Arts and the Kassel University of the Arts. In 2013, she founded the exhibition space GOLD+BETON at Cologne’s Ebertplatz. From 2015 to 2019, she took on teaching positions at the Institute for Art and Art Theory at the University of Cologne and at the Faculty of Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn. She curated exhibitions in Germany and abroad for the Westdeutscher Künstlerbund.

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2017 was awarded to Pauline M’Barek.

Members of the three-person jury were Dr. Inke Arns (Director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstverein, Dortmund), Thomas Thiel (Director of Kunstverein Bielefeld) and Céline Berger (artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2015). The jury selected the scholarship holder from 62 applications.

Jury statement
The artist Pauline M’barek, who was born in Cologne in 1979 and lives there, deals with fundamental questions of human perception in her multimedia performances. The subject of her video and audio installations, sculptures, drawings are media of perception (vitrine, holders) as well as the senses themselves. The interactions of seeing, hearing and touching preoccupy the artist as much as the significance of corporeality for human perception. In the continuous intersection of objective and subjective perspectives, M’barek relativises our awareness of the world. In her video Semiophoren (2013), for example, black, ethnological objects only become visible to the viewer through gestures of contact with white gloves due to a black image background. In contrast, the series of works Artifacts (2014) shows individual forms of touch as the artist reproduces individual hand movements in foreign-seeming artefacts made of alabaster plaster. As a consequence of the various translations of tactile experience, the artist also dealt with the possible touches of the eye and a materiality of seeing in her video Glance (2014) or the photograph Selbstporträt nach Ernst Mach (2014).
Her new project named Glance – the body in view, to be realised within the scolarship of the 2017 scholarship of the state of NRW for a media artist, will continue these artistic investigations into seeing as a tactile process. The production of a video is planned, which will tie in with findings from earlier works and focus on the body as the actual medium of perception. This time the artist wants to capture the viewer’s subjective gaze under professional conditions with macro shots of the pupil and at simultaneously use them as a mirror of an architectural environment and physical movement in space. Since the pupil also reflects the body (nose, hands, legs, etc.), we will explore a space that is unfamiliar to us through the eyes of an other person in the video and follow the minimal movement sequences of a rehearsed performance. In this way, a “second-order observation” or a slow “groping with the gaze” (Merleau-Ponty) is created in the Luhmannian sense – thanks to a natural distorting mirror, the glance in the gaze.

Pauline M‘barek (*1979 in Cologne) lives and works in Brussels and Cologne, studied fine arts at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg (2000-2007), École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Marseille (2003-2004) and finally postgraduate media art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne (2007-2009). The jury is impressed by this medially diverse and still very focused artist, who can already point to a very autonomous portfolio of work and numerous important awards.

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2011 was awarded to Kerstin Ergenzinger.

Members of the three-person jury were Dr. Inke Arns (Director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstverein, Dortmund), Thibaut de Ruyter (art critic, Berlin) and Susanne Weirich (artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2008).

Jury statement
Kerstin Ergenzinger (living in Cologne) creates space-related, reactive installations, such as the impressive light installation ..W / ..O KEINGRADWESTUNDKEINGRADOST (2006), which consisted of a walk-in box whose corners were visualised by projected lines that shifted barely noticeably. The jury was also impressed by the expansive kinetic installation Studie zur Sehnsucht (2007-2009), which transferred seismological data into slowly changing mountain and ground formations.
Kerstin Ergenzinger’s project Rotes Rauschen is an experimental installation, a pseudo-scientific arrangement, an artistic study to explore the raw material of our perception – and a sculpture. The artist plans to transform a room in a stand-alone building without a basement into a “spatial seismometer and state and unrest meter”. This “listens to the tilts – that is, the shifts of weight inside it – as well as the slow frequencies of the omnipresent seismic noise that travels through the floor beneath it.” Everyone who enters such a spatial seismometer changes the weight distribution of the place and shifts the structure of relationships in space.
The project was presented at the Hartware MedienKunstVerein in 2012.

Kerstin Ergenzinger (*1975 in Gomadingen) works in and between the fields of sculpture, sound, kinetics, light and drawing. The central theme of her practice is the indissoluble relationship between body and world, between perception and the perceived, between sensual exploration and the construction of meaning. Central to her work are cross-disciplinary art and research projects, including co-editing the artistic and academic publication Navigating Noise (Walther König, Berlin).

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2012 was awarded to Denise Ritter.

Members of the three-person jury were Dr. Inke Arns (Director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund), Ute Vorkoeper (Curator, Hamburg) and Kerstin Ergenzinger (Artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2011).

Jury statement
The oftentimes multichannel electroacoustic compositions in the sound installations, sculptures and objects by the artist and graduate geographer Denise Ritter (who lives in Dortmund) always take real sound situations as their starting point – such as the sounds of a rolling mill in Lorraine; sounds the artist creates when she falls asleep; the scratching of plant leaves on masonry; radio transmission between the Earth and the International Space Station (ISS). In addition to the precise and nuanced elaboration of the compositions, the jury was quite impressed by Ritter’s artistic approach to space and form (the artist calls them “audio-cartographic installations – walkable floor installations – with map signatures made of wire, speakers and compositions that reflect the landscape space in which they are made”). Her project idea “small world wide” is based on the so-called “small world phenomenon”, according to which supposedly everyone in the world knows everyone else through a maximum of six corners (“six degrees of separation”). The artist will define ten destinations (e.g. the International Space Station ISS, the research ship Polarstern of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, the Kenogami Jungle in Ontario, etc.) and have recording devices reach the ten destinations via a chain of acquaintances through ten “starting persons”, which are to be documented by ten “target persons” via audio recordings. The audio material generated in this way becomes the starting point for a new audio-cartographic installation.
Denise Ritter in an interview about her project / Website of the project

Denise Ritter (*1971, Rodalben) is a sound artist. In her sound installations, she brings electro-acoustic compositions into harmony with sculptural spatial interventions. She has a graduate in geography, studied audiovisual art at the HBKsaar in Saarbrücken and was a master student of Christina Kubisch. Denise Ritter is, among other things, a winner of the German Sound Art Award, is represented at exhibitions and festivals in Germany and other countries and also realises sound installations in public spaces.

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2010 was awarded to Tina Tonagel.

Members of the three-person jury were Dr. Inke Arns (Director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund), Thibaut de Ruyter (art critic, Berlin) and Susanne Weirich (artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2008).

Jury statement
The artist Tina Tonagel (Cologne) has been developing experimental works with overhead projectors for several years. Starting with purely visual installations in which kinetic set-ups on the projectors generated images in real time, the artist has recently begun to extend these space-related installations with sound components. Tina Tonagel’s project “Himalaya Variations” is an audiovisual performance with two overhead projectors. Self-made sound generators/musical instruments are placed on the projectors’ support surfaces; these instruments are played live and visualised in real time. The concept for this “kinetic overhead installation” as well as this artist’s love of experimentation, wit and sense of humour convinced the jury.

The finished work of the scholarship was shown at the HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in 2011.

Tina Tonagel (*1973 in Lemgo) studied at the University of Bielefeld and at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (graduated 2004). She received, among others, the Milla and Partner Prize for Media in Space (Stuttgart Filmwinter) in 2004, the 5th Marl Video Installation Prize (Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl) in 2008, a scholarship from the Kunststiftung NRW (promotion of young artists) in 2009 and the Stiftung Kunstfonds working scholarship in 2011.

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2008 was awarded to Susanne Weirich.

Members of the three-person jury were Susanne Ackers (former managing director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund), Annette Schindler (former director of plug.in, Basel) and Sabine Himmelsbach (former director of Edith-Ruß-Haus, Oldenburg).

Jury statement
The concept “Angels in Chains” by Susanne Weirich provides an examination of the group of three women who were involved in the Tate / La Bianca murders: Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie van Houten. The research already done by the artist on relevant films and TV interviews as well as YouTube links brought interesting material to light. In this context, the link to the TV series “Charlie’s Angels”, which is also mentioned in the title of the work and which shows the role of the media in constituting reality, was quite fascinating. The intended multimedia installation will interweave the media images and constructs and blend one Hollywood image with the other. The result will be a type of re-enactment of the US series “Three Angels for Charlie”, which first broadcast in 1976 and was restaged as a Hollywood blockbuster in 2000 and 2003. Their staging of female self-empowerment corresponds with the way the women’s group of the “Manson Family” is produced.
The jury was particularly impressed by the way in which a gender discourse is established through the violent behaviour that is illegitimate for women, which is “plausibly” portrayed in both cases. In addition to these thematic aspects, the intended technical-formal realisation, which has already been excellently handled in previous works by Susanne Weirich, was convincing, as the jury was able to verify on the basis of the submitted material on the artist’s work.
The funding provided by the scholarship from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for the artist, who was born in Unna (*1962) and has lived in Berlin for several years, allowed her to work intensively on the conception and realisation of the installation. The finished work was shown in January 2009 in the exhibition Man Son. The Horror of the Situation, curated by Frank Barth and Dirck Möllmann for the Hamburger Kunsthalle, which explores the topic of Charles Manson and “The Family” in detail.

The work realised within the context of the scholarship was presented at the HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in 2009.

Susanne Weirich (*1962 in Unna) shows diverse artistic strategies in her prototypical realisations of installations, objects and media productions. Starting from an accent on text as material, current works turn to forms of ritual in transcultural contexts. She has been a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen since 2011. A retrospective of her work was shown in the film ART GIRLS in 2013, and international exhibitions of her work have recently been held in Bolivia and China.

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2007 was awarded to Rena Tangens.

Members of the three-person jury were Dr. Inke Arns (Director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund), Cornelia Sollfrank (artist, Hamburg/Celle) and Rosa Barba (artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2005).

Jury statement
Based on Lev Manovich’s observation that “(media) augmented space is monitored space”, Rena Tangens’ project Citizens need parks, netizens need privacy will deal with the effects of real or expected observation on human behaviour and point out technical, political, but also artistic opportunities for acting against the loss of informational self-determination, which is often perceived as inescapable. Their concept of art is an expanded one that extends the Beuysian concept of “social sculpture” into the media space and sketches out a decidedly political form of “relational aesthetics”. Tangens’ project, which explicitly refers to Frederick Law Olmsted, aims to encourage reflection on and critical participation in the social, societal and political processes that take place in “augmented space” within an aesthetic framework.

Rena Tangens (*1960 in Bielefeld) s an artist, publicist, net pioneer and co-founder of the Bielefeld-based Digitalcourage e.V. In 1984, she founded the art project Art d’Ameublement together with her colleague padeluun. Since 2000, she has researched and organised the annual German BigBrotherAwards (the “Oscars for data octopuses”). Rena Tangens coined the word “data octopus” in 2001, which has since entered common usage. In 2004, together with padeluun, she received the art prize “Evolutionary Cells”, in 2008 the Theodor Heuss Medal for her commitment to civil rights, in 2014 the taz Panter Prize for “Everyday Heroes”, in 2015 the “Personality of Consumer Protection” prize of the German Foundation for Consumer Protection, in 2016 the Bielefeld Women’s Prize and in 2018 the Honorary Pin of the City of Bielefeld.

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2009 was awarded to Agnes Meyer-Brandis.

Members of the three-person jury were Susanne Ackers (former managing director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund), Annette Schindler (former director of plug.in, Basel) and Sabine Himmelsbach (former director of Edith-Ruß-Haus, Oldenburg).

Jury statement
“The Unknown Theory Objects, also known as UTO’s, are accidental condensations of the theoretical field. … UTO’s are crystal balls in which the diffuse light of a theorem that does not yet exist appears.”
This was written in 1993 by the Bilwet agency from Amsterdam, which aims to disseminate illegal sciences. These illegal sciences are often associated with something like futurology in general or trend research in particular.
The submitted project is entitled The Moon Goose Experiment/a bio-poetic investigation. The materials existing already are observations of the Moon Goose’s behaviour and reaction under the influence of the total solar eclipse in Siberia, 2008, which the artist collected during a Siberian expedition to Novosibirsk. Similar to the classical behaviour of migratory birds, the Moon Goose migrates from the Earth to the Moon and back. Researcher Agnes Meyer-Brandis is investigating the question: What disturbance or change does the solar eclipse cause to the flight routes, the flight rhythm and the behaviour of the moon goose?
Agnes Meyer-Brandis uses technology as a pseudo-scientific instrument. She makes use of this scientific instrument and transforms it aesthetically in an artistic way by constructing and opening up imaginary worlds. The artistically strong position promoted by this project links biological processes with technological-scientific methods in a performative form. The poetic investigation of science makes a smart and complex statement on the major theme of “science and art”.
The results of the residency were presented at HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in 2009.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis (*1973 in Aachen) lives in Cologne. With her overall concept Forschungsfloß für Unterirdische Riffologie u. V. / www.ffur.de she developed her own language and defines her role very precisely as that of a poetics scientist. In different references to place and research journeys, her artistic language is constantly given new vocabulary.

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2014 was awarded to Marianna Christofides.

Members of the three-person jury were Dr. Inke Arns (Director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund), Thomas Thiel (former Director of Kunstverein Bielefeld) and Denise Ritter (artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2012) and. The jury selected the scholarship holders from 55 applications.

Jury statement
The artistic practice of the cypriot media artist Marianna Christofides, who lives in Cologne, includes multimedia installations, slide projections, objects, photographs and texts. The thematic starting point of her cross-media works is often travel experiences, specific places or personal stories. She subjects archival material such as old glass slides, photographs and cartographies, text, film and sound material to artistic transformation and combines them in spatial installations with her own images and objects. As a result, temporal, geographical and thematic narrative strands often flow together quite intentionally in her works. By linking past and present, using transdisciplinary information and documentary methods, Christofides creates her own atmospheric topographies and fictional visual environments.
All her projects are characterised by a process of approaching the material and her own research, which reveals valid doubts about the fixed reality of objects, places and landscapes. For example, her current video work Here let me stand (2013, HD video with sound |4:3| 29’42” loop) focuses on an extensive folio from 1881 entitled Cyprus Antiquities – Excavated by Major Alexander Palma di Cesnola from the National Archives of London. Christofides combines the highly detailed images of archaeological artefacts, their chronologically as well as topographically subjective classification into a slow, poetic tracking shot. For l’histoire d’histoire d’une histoire (installation, 2012), randomly collected Laterna Magica glass slides were digitised, partially edited and condensed into a fictional film history in 200 still images.
The jury was convinced by Christofides’ multi-layered work and her proposed project, which – based on an already planned residency – will continue the examination of the surface imprint of the landscape around Los Angeles, tracing socio-economic, geological and architectural traces of contemporary history there. Using the methods of cinematic montage, the artist will draw a current landscape portrait consisting of several media, temporal and disciplinary sources.

Marianna Christofides (*1980 in Nikosia, Cyprus) lives and works in Cologne. In 2011, the artist represented Cyprus at the 54th Venice Biennale. She has received numerous awards, including scholarships from the Stiftung Kunstfonds, Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Alexander S. Onassis Stiftung, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Imhoff Stiftung and was nominated for the 8th Deste Prize in Athens. She is currently a fellow at Villa Aurora, Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions of her work have been held at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Athens), Gasworks (London), Kölnischer Kunstverein, Museum für Fotografie (Braunschweig), Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Kunsthalle Bremen and BOZAR Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels).

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2001 was awarded to Ani Schulze.Bettina Lockemann.

Members of the three-person jury were Iris Dressler (former director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund), Sophie Delvallée (artist, Avignon) and Ute Vorkoeper (curator, Hamburg).

Jury statement
The 2001 scholarship of the State of NRW for a media artist from NRW was awarded to the artist Bettina Lockemann for her concept Was habe ich eigentlich mit der Raumfahrt zu tun? Archiv der Gegenwart (working title). The project addresses the multi-layered overlaps between public and private events/memories. The works Border Patrol and Position I and II by Bettina Lockemann, which were developed as part of her scholarship project, were part of an international group exhibition nicht weit von der wirklichkeit entfernt in autumn 2002 at HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

Bettina Lockemann (*1971 in Berlin) ist Künstlerin und Wissenschaftlerin mit dem Schwerpunkt künstlerische Dokumentarfotografie. Nach einer Lehre zur Fotografin in Berlin studierte sie künstlerische Fotografie und Medienkunst in Leipzig und promovierte in Kunstgeschichte in Stuttgart. Sie war fünf Jahre lang Professorin für Praxis und Theorie der Fotografie an der HBK Braunschweig. Sie erhielt zahlreiche Förderungen und präsentiert ihre Arbeiten in Ausstellungen, Vorträgen, Fotobüchern und Texten. Sie lebt in Köln.

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2000 was awarded to Ilona Johanna Plattner.

Members of the three-person jury were Iris Dressler (founder of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund), Christine Meierhofer (art historian, Berlin) and Dr. Friederike Wappler (lecturer at the Institute of Art History, Ruhr University Bochum).

Jury statement

The first scholarship from the state of NRW for a female media artist from NRW was awarded to Ilona Johanna Plattner, who applied with her concept for www.dieMystikerin.de: a web art project that questions the status of the real, the fictional and the virtual. www.dieMystikerin.de was presented in an expanded form (installation Stellen im Hirn und andersWo) as part of the exhibition Chiffren + Legenden (March/April 2001). Parallel to this, the mystic’s website was presented at the international film festival femme totale.

Stellen im Hirn und andersWo, spatial installation, 2001:
Based on the etymological meaning of place as “extreme end”, Stellen im Hirn und andersWo poses the question of reality, of its constitution and construction and of its media. Where is the furthest end, the unimaginable, where nothingness begins? Each place deals with a different set of themes and/or media, the handling and signification of contexts of perception. In different places at different times, different places are combined and modified. dieMystikerin as a switching point and germ cell questions what a person is, what constitutes a person in relation to communication media that do not require a physical presence. The material medium is different in each case, it influences and determines what is to be perceived. The places change in form and content, in image and text, in real and fictional, in concrete and virtual, in life and death; musical structures of repetition and variation. (Ilona Johanna Plattner)
www.dieMystikerin.de, web art project, since 2000, produced within the framework of the scholarship of the state of NRW for female media artists from NRW:
Everything starts with a tablet. The gap indicates a product, but it does not contain the substance to relieve the headache, but rather the writing that titles this web art work: The Mystic. The domain of the “mystic” has existed since May 2000, and since then the work has taken on ever new forms. It is a central component of a core work (“Stellen im Hirn und andersWo”) by the artist Ilona Johanna Plattner.
The “Mystic” is unthinkable as an offline work, because it calculates with the surfer’s subscription and reflects this through its structure appropriate to the web and the corresponding form. The use of simple coding, which always remains understandable even for the not too skilled layperson, refers to the history of the HTTP protocol and of HTML as a system for text transmission and page description from a time before multimedia. The work is not based on closure, but it is also not performative in the proper sense. However, it does deal with conditions that generally revolve around the concept of virtuality, language and the artist. In this sense, it is appropriate to the medium of the Internet. Not every update is an addition. Sometimes it is the small changes like deletions that cause irritation to the viewer.
The central aspect is the self-describing element and the question of identity in the age of digitality. Since its popularisation, the internet has deconstructively negotiated the concept of identity in many ways. Transgendering in chat rooms (but also in text-based adventures), for example, allowed a real-time set of communication rules to change name, gender or genre according to set conditions. The understanding of the respective community could be counted on. But what theorising about such phenomena largely ignored was the physical constitution, which led to exorbitant theoretical bubbles that, in extreme positions, already placed people in a nirvana of zero and one.
The term mystic functions as more than just a metaphor in Ilona Johanna Plattner’s work. By linking an ancient religious-intellectual phenomenon with the questioning of identity claims in our time, Plattner articulates a critique of the technocratic attitude towards the web. At the same time, however, the work intensively questions the networking of identity with the concept of the artist and plays this out on the basis of autobiographical details, which, strictly defined, are fictionalised by the medium. In order to clarify the ranges, Plattner repeatedly produces local installations of her work, extracts images, text fragments and arranges them into complex self-referential settings that expose the literariness of the internet in a circular way. In the process, the modularity in real space corresponds equally to the work on the internet.
In this context, www.dieMystikerin.de is both the centre and the periphery of a notion of identity, language and meaning that has begun to rotate. (Matthias Weiß)

Note: The website www.dieMystikerin.de has been offline since mid-2018. The last version can be read in the Internet Archive.

Ilona Johanna Plattner (*1961 in Dachau):Creating art is an act of liberation. I detach myself from the attributions, the morals and the existing viewpoints. I dissect and re-evaluate. Art is like a birth. To be born takes time and patience and skill and practice. Then, when art is born, when it spreads, it can shatter, comfort and cause rebellion. The power of art is one that is often underestimated. It works in the underground, in the unknowing, and it works in unpredictable ways.

Further information on the artist’s website

The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2003 was awarded to Aurelia Mihai.

Members of the three-person jury were Iris Dressler (former director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund), Diana Ebster (former curator at lothringer 13/spiegel, Munich) and Anja Kreysing (artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2002). The jury selected the scholarship holder from 53 applications.

Jury statement
Aurelia Mihai’s project Tal der Träumer is based on an examination of historical culture in the USA. The intention is to create an installation based on two spaces, which on the one hand takes up the aesthetics and languages of the scientific exhibition and on the other hand of the scientific-documentary film. California and Nevada become the paradoxical venue for Egyptological research and archaeological excavations. The subject of the investigation are detailed imitations of Tutankhamun’s tomb or the Sphinx, as found in the gambler’s metropolis of Las Vegas, as well as film sets from the Hollywood industry.
The staging of a fictional and “fake” study of antiquity is caught up with reality: for example, the movie set of Cecil B. De Mille’s monumental film The Ten Commandments (1923) – i.e. the set of a 30-metre-long temple architecture – was buried in the sand of the Santa Maria dunes after the end of filming. Remains of these sets were found 10 years ago and examined by archaeologists. However, the movie set has not yet been lifted The jury was convinced by the accurate preliminary research, the conceptual approach as well as the planned realisation and presentation of the project. Furthermore, the complex layers between documentation, fiction, science and illusionism, which the project Tal der Träumer contrasts, were decisive.

In addition, the projects submitted by Christine Erhard (Düsseldorf) and Monika Pirch (Düsseldorf) were also mentioned with praise.

Aurelia Mihai (*1968 in Bucharest, Romania) studied at the Art Academy Bucharest, Art Academy Düsseldorf and at the KHM Cologne. She has been teaching at the HBK Braunschweig since 2009. Prizes and scholarships among others: E-STAR scholarship IEA N.Y., Villa Aurora scholarship, L.A., EMARE scholarship, HTBA Hull, Förderpreis für Bildende Kunst der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf; EuRegio Kunstpreis; Villa Massimo scholarship Rome and IASPIS, Stockholm. Her works have been shown internationally and have been featured at numerous festivals.

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The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2006 was awarded to Anne Pöhlmann.

Members of the three-person jury were Dr. Inke Arns (Director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund), Cornelia Sollfrank (artist, Hamburg/Celle) and Rosa Barba (artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2005).

Jury statement
The 2006 NRW scholarship for female media artists goes to Anne Pöhlmann (Düsseldorf) for the project Skater im erweiterten Raum. In her artistic work, Anne Pöhlmann has been dealing with “visions of the future from the past that have become real” for quite some time. This interest has brought her to the Parisian districts of La Defense and Beaugrenelle. In Paris, she also came across a website with photos of young people skateboarding in these same neighbourhoods. According to Pöhlmann, the skaters occupy precisely those places ” in between the architecture, in between the defined and enclosed spaces”. These non-places, in-between spaces, paths, corners, purposeless zones – negative forms of the surrounding architecture – in turn preferentially appear as sceneries in computer games. Pöhlmann asks whether these non-controlled places, which evade urban planning, economic, commercial or digital control structures, are not the last romantically occupied free spaces of the big city. Her artistic project will use the purpose-free zones to show parallels between urban architecture and computer games.
The results of the scholarship were presented in the exhibition Walkthrough at HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein.

Anne Pöhlmann (*1978 in Dresden) studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. 2018-2019 substitute professor for photography, HBK Braunschweig. Solo exhibitions including Japanraum Langen Foundation and Peter Mertes Stipendium Bonner Kunstverein. Since 2002 various group exhibitions including Bon Voyage! Reisen in der Kunst der Gegenwart Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst Aachen (2020), Stop talking, let’s play! Kunsthalle Lingen (2019) and Next Generations. Current Photography made in the Rhineland Museum Morsbroich Leverkusen.

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The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2018 was awarded to Nico Joana Weber.

Members of the three-person jury were Dr. Inke Arns (Director of HMKV, Dortmund), Tasja Langenbach (Curator and Artistic Director of Videonale, Bonn) and Pauline M’Barek (Artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2017). The jury selected the scholarship holder from 56 applications.

Jury statement
In her works, Nico Joana Weber explores along dichotomously imagined structures such as centre – periphery, architecture – nature, inside – outside and transfers them into a state of hybridity. Or rather: she dissects the hybrid that is already immanent in these structures and uncovers it. The starting point of her research is often architectural bodies, on and in which narratives of historical and cultural processes of appropriation and change can be read. For example, in works such as Monstera Deliciosa (2018) or Unstable Landscape (2016), Nico Joana Weber reconstructs how Western-influenced architectures locate themselves in the tropical environment of South America. The architectures are not shown here purely as an expression of the dominance of one culture and its technology over another. Rather, the vulnerability of these buildings is uncovered, which have to assert themselves as foreign bodies in the context of local conditions.Within the framework of the scholarship awarded here, Nico Joana Weber wants to advance her project Hybrid Moments (AT). The project approaches Nigeria’s colonial past through the various architectural designs that can still be found there today as a legacy of British colonisation on the one hand and the Portuguese slave trade from Nigeria to the former colony of Brazil on the other. Key to this are both the realised designs of architects from the Department of Tropical Architecture, which was formed at the Architectural Association in London between 1955 and 1970, and the so-called “Brazilian Houses”, which were created in Lagos by former slaves who had returned from Brazil. Architecture can be experienced here not only as a manifestation of global historical processes and as a hybrid cultural building in which influences flows into one another from the centre and the periphery on an equal basis. At the same time, it is permanently documented as a cultural asset in decay that threatens to be lost in the transition between modernity and the present. We are positive that Nico Joana Weber will find impressive ways of representing these complex processes in her images and the subsequent spatial installation, and are glad to be able to support her in this ambitious project with the bursary for female media artists from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Nico Joana Weber (*1983 in Bonn) works with video, photography and multimedia spatial installations. She studied Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths College in London and completed her postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne in 2013. In her work, she deals with the aesthetic and political imprints of architecture and landscape in transcultural contexts.

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The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2019 was awarded to Vanja Smiljanić.

Members of the three-person jury were Dr. Inke Arns (Director of HMKV, Dortmund), Tasja Langenbach (Curator and Artistic Director of Videonale, Bonn) and Pauline M’Barek (Artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2017). The jury selected the scholarship holders from 56 applications.

Jury statement
Vanja Smiljanić is interested in speculative narratives, feminist science fiction and a new materialism that connects the physical with the otherworldly. Since 2010, she has been involved with the new religious UFO movement “Cosmic People”. After many unsuccessful attempts, Smiljanic finally became a member in 2013 and today describes herself as the “senior architect” of the “Library of Light” of the “Cosmic People”, i.e. the archive whose contents she is beginning to change ‘from the inside out’. She reports on this (subversive) activity in lecture-performances. Vanja Smiljanic reflects on her subject from an ambivalent inside – and lets an interested public participate in her artistic research work in novel live formats.
Within the framework of the scholarship, Vanja Smiljanić will work on her experimental documentary film Herland. For this, she will work with members of the “new religious movement” “Unarius”, a religious UFO cult founded in 1954 in El Cajon, California (USA). As in previous projects, the artist seeks to use the “unscientific” practices developed by this group as alternative methods of critical thinking. At Unarius, Vanja Smiljanić is particularly interested in the “Past Life Therapy” practised there. The artist reinterprets this into a “choreography of becoming” that is supposed to lead to a “trans-personal state”. The film will focus on Billie Stafford, a 78-year-old woman whose past lives allegedly included Leonardo da Vinci, an illegitimate daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a utopian feminist author and an intellectual leader of the American women’s movement. Her book Herland (1915) depicts a fictional, women-only society free of war, violence and domination. Based on interviews with Stafford/Gilman, Vanja Smiljanić will develop an experimental documentary format that will take viewers on a journey into the history of feminist and anarchist science fiction, cyberfeminism and tech noir. Dr. Inke Arns for the jury

The work Orion Debacle was shown as Video of the Month at Hartware MedienKunstVerein in April 2019.

Vanja Smiljanić (*1986 in Belgrad) is an artist born in Belgrade and living in Cologne. Her research focuses on visual art, video and performance. In her practice, she often uses the performance-lecture model as a way to cross fictional and experiential universes that include technical gadgets, diagrams and sci-fi povera sculptures. Her work combines otherwise non-comparable systems of reality and bears witness to the basis of ideologies as alienated regimes, using her own body as a medium of narration, often shifting between the position of oracle and storyteller.

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The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2020 was awarded to Julia Weißenberg.

Members of the three-person jury were Heike Ander (cultural scientist and curator, Academy of Media Arts, Cologne), Dr Linnea Semmerling (Director IMAI Foundation – Inter Media Art Institute, Düsseldorf) and Julia Weißenberg (artist and NRW Media Art Fellow 2020, Cologne). The jury selected the scholarship holders from 62 applications.

Jury statement
What narratives are underneath the surfaces of architectures, objects, products that surround us every day? What stories are woven into them? What politics of social global coexistence are hidden behind the appearance of the exterior? Julia Weißenberg explores and reveals these politics in her works using a wide variety of media and forms. They are the stories of raw materials that we wear on our bodies every day in the form of clothing or technical equipment and which, seen in their pure form, expose global dependency relationships and trade routes. It is the narratives of brands and products that are invisible layers over our perception and our bodies. And it is the architectures that manifest utopias and worldviews in their location in space and time. Julia Weißenberg breaks up these surfaces with specific interventions and invites us to take a deeper look.
In her project The Habitat, with which Julia Weißenberg applied for the scholarship for female media artists, the artist also looks behind the scenes of contemporary architecture and asks how different types of work are reflected in the forms of our living. Specifically, she compares the living spaces of “digital nomads” with those of Chinese migrant workers in so-called “urban villages”. While the former determine their place of residence themselves according to their own criteria and understand living out of a suitcase as the luxury of freedom of a Western lifestyle, the latter are the pawn of superior power relations and are condemned to live and dwell in a permanently temporary state between demolition and a new beginning. How can a sense of security, safety and identity be created under these respective conditions and in the architecture designed for them, and what connection do our human bodies have to make with the architectural bodies for this to happen? What relevance do these categories have at all for a modern nomadism? And is there a right to something like home? We are pleased to support Julia Weißenberg in realising this project with the scholarship for female media artists from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and we are excited about the new readings she will open up for us as a result. Tasja Langenbach for the jury

Julia Weißenberg (*1982 in Bergisch Gladbach) studied at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, where she graduated in 2012.

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The scholarship of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for female media artists 2021 was awarded to Sophia Bauer.

Members of the three-person jury were Heike Ander (cultural scientist and curator, Academy of Media Arts, Cologne), Tasja Langenbach (curator and artistic director of the Videonale, Bonn) and Nico Joana Weber (artist and NRW Media Art Scholarship Holder 2018). The jury selected the scholarship holders from 62 applications.

Jury statement
Sophia Bauer’s artistic practice focuses on sound as a historical document and resource for new forms of knowledge production: “Thinking through sound as a network of connection and belonging helps us to question structures of exclusion,” says the artist. She sees sound “as a medium that can critically illuminate the core ideas of the concepts of separation of European imperialism and colonialism”. In her works – most recently mainly sound installations and sound archives – Sophia Bauer questions the traditional hierarchical structures of an asymmetrical power relationship between humans and nature. With the help of sound recordings, the aftermath of colonial structures, as manifested for example in the biosocial (communication) networks of domesticated forests, are traced and revealed in order to create alternative contexts through recontextualisation and to gain new insights for postcolonial discourses.
In her multi-part work complex Forest Scapes (since 2019), Sophia Bauer explores the influence of colonialism – inscribed in botanical and zoological taxonomy – on various forest landscapes. Following on from her sound installation “Kereita Forest Block” about a cypress plantation in the Kenyan highlands, the artist is now planning a comprehensive sound study of the “Arabuko Sokoke Forest”, one of the last largely intact dry coastal forests in East Africa, covering an area of 420 square kilometres, as part of the NRW scholarship for female media artists. At the centre of Sophia Bauer’s acoustic elaboration is a rethinking of the network of relationships between inhabitants, users, places and plants. The artistic source material ranges from reports from the National Archive of Kenya dating back to colonial times to interviews and sounds of trees, birds and insects recorded with highly sensitive contact microphones. From this repertoire, Sophia Bauer creates a sound composition that is arranged on the basis of acoustic characteristics to form a constantly changing mesh of sound and brought into a spatial installation. Sophia Bauer has convinced us with her sound study Forest Scapes: Arabuko Sokoke Forest, which promises to offer a complex, profound and political experience of natural spaces and cultural landscapes. We are pleased to be able to support this transcontinental project with the NRW scholarship for female media artists.

Sophia Bauer (*1987 in Ebersberg) works primarily with sound, video and photography in her installative-multimedia works. She studied African languages, literature and art at the University of Bayreuth and graduated in Media Arts at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in 2019.

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