Fourth Award

We are pleased to announce that film-maker John Akomfrah and museum director and curator Charles Esche have been awarded the 4th Princess Margriet Award.

 

We must be radical and innovative if we are to build Europe anew. That was the clear message emanating from the fourth Princess Margriet Award (PMA) dedicated to artists and thinkers who make change possible. The new PMA laureates, filmmaker John Akomfrah and curator Charles Esche, received their awards in the Brussels cultural venue, The Egg, on March 19th, 2012.

John Akomfrah was chosen for his ground-breaking film oeuvre woven from perspectives often hidden from the mainstream narratives of European history; Charles Esche for his exceptional leadership in rethinking centers and museums of art as public spaces that show us the power and value of art in engaging with the contemporary world.

The prestigious annual public award ceremony was hosted by ECF’s Director Katherine Watson and was attended by HRH Princess Margriet of the Netherlands, HRH Princess Astrid of Belgium and ECF’s President HRH Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands.   

In her opening speech, Princess Laurentien observed that ‘the Europe we have today is still young and will not last unless we continue to build, invest in and visualize our future’.  She praised the laureates for pushing boundaries and generating images of who we are and who we might become. Read the entire speech here.

The award ceremony was notable for the first screening of Peripeteia, a specially commissioned short film by Akomfrah, and a speech celebrating Esche's work, given by the Italian activist Franco 'Bifo' Berardi and called Art in the Age of Barbarisation.

Akomfrah and Esche have mixed aesthetics and radical politics throughout their distinguished careers. In his laudation, PMA jury member Jan Dibbets praised Akomfrah's whole film oeuvre - begun so spectacularly with the groundbreaking Handsworth Songs - for having cast an honest and loving eye on Europe's migrants. He also praised Esche, Director of Eindhoven's Van Abbemuseum, for expanding our ideas of what a museum can be, and proving that culture is a living system of values that is forever changing as we enter into conversation with it.

Prior to the Award ceremony on the 19 March, ECF and Flemish-Dutch House deBuren hosted a public debate "Politics, economics and culture, a different balance?" between laureate Charles Esche, Franco "Bifo" Berardi (writer and activist), Judith Marquand (Oxford University) with moderator Frénk van der Linden (writer and journalist).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The debate addressed the urgent responsibilities of culture, economics and politics in constructing a new horizon of democracy. Esche, Berardi and Marquand affirmed the need for investment in culture and the arts if we are to safeguard democracy in Europe.

The awards were personally presented by Princess Margriet of the Netherlands.

As well as a sum of 25,000 euros each, the new laureates received sonic awards, created by the sound artist Nathalie Bruys to resonate with a unique frequency.

 

ECF's hope is that the radical message of the PMA will resonate across the European political and cultural landscape.

 

The selection process

This year's award laureates were selected from a list of 90 nominations of internationally renowned cultural thinkers and practitioners, nominated by a network of eminent cultural actors from all over Europe. The Princess Margriet Award jury reviewed all submissions and made its final choice in autumn 2011.

The jury members of the 4th edition of ECF Princess Margriet Award are:
Hilary Carty (Chair), former Director, Cultural Leadership Programme, UK;
Sudeep Dasgupta, Associate Professor, Dept of Media & Culture, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands,
Jan Dibbets, Artist, Netherlands;
Maria Lind, Curator and Director, Tensta Konsthall, Sweden;
Els van der Plas, Director, Premsela, Dutch Platform for Design and Fashion, Netherlands.

 

More on the Artists - John Akomfrah and Charles Esche

John Akomfrah

Born Accra, Ghana (1957), lives and works in London
Film-maker, Cultural Activist

John Akomfrah’s films are at once poetic and essayistic - creative dialogues that pose intriguing questions about culture, migration, integration and intercultural exchange. He explores both urban and rural landscapes, using diverse perspectives to challenge accepted narratives of history and give prominence to its unheralded changemakers.

The jury lauded the development of Akomfrah’s oeuvre from his earliest film the ground-breaking Handsworth Songs (1986) to his latest film, Nine Muses (2010), an artistic meditation on migration, myth and memory which creatively weaves together layers of original footage, archival clips, sound and poetry.

In its entirety, Akomfrah’s longstanding body of work is a profound and multi-layered creation championing voices often hidden from the mainstream discourse of European pasts.

In 1982 Akomfrah was a founding member of  the Black Audio Film Collective, the seminal British film-making collective and produced a broad range of work — fictional films, tape slide installations, gallery installations, experimental videos and creative documentaries. Since 1998, Akomfrah is Director of the film and television production companies, Smoking Dogs Films, (London) and Creation Rebel Films (Accra).

Akomfrah is currently promoting his latest film, The Nine Muses, which has achieved global critical acclaim and launches in the UK on 20 January 2012.

Charles Esche

Born Harrogate, England (1962), lives and works in Eindhoven and Edinburgh
Museum Director, Curator, Writer

The jury chose Charles Esche, Director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, for the span of his curatorial oeuvre in which he has opened up the museum as a public space of active engagement that reaches out to both local and international communities.

His impressive record of challenging programming (exhibitions, debates, symposia), has developed a conversation between art and society, a conversation which imagines how individual citizens can live and enact a future society together.

Since the 90s, Esche has, together with a roster of artists and with the teams of Tramway (Glasgow), Rooseum (Malmö) and the Van Abbemuseum explored the many potential functions of contemporary art centres and museums as important agents in and of the public sphere.

 

 

At a time of increased entertainment of culture and decreased access to public spaces, Esche's work as a curator and leader of institutions is of utmost value. His ability to create meaningful and urgent debates within and beyond contemporary art is followed by many practitioners around the world and acts as a powerful inspiration.

If you want to see Esche’s work in action, he has co-curated an exhibition called Spirits of Internationalism with Steven ten Thije, which opens at the Van Abbemuseum between the 21 January and 29 April 2012. The exhibition is also simultaneously on show in Antwerp at M KHA.