Ellen Auerbach Fellowship 2023: Joanna Piotrowska
The Ellen Auerbach Fellowship for outstanding young international photography 2023 is to be awarded to Joanna Piotrowska. In her black and white silver gelatine prints and 16mm films, the Polish artist deals with topics such as family, home, intimacy and the position of women. She shows people in their entanglements in social systems and in their struggle against manifestations of power, emotional dependencies and human violence.
With welcoming remarks by the Akademie’s vice president Kathrin Röggla and a laudatio by Hubertus von Amelunxen. The artist talk will be held by the curator Juliane Bischoff. At the beginning and end of the ceremony, the musician and singer Baal & Mortimer will play selected pieces from current albums.
The fellowship grant, endowed with 20,000 euros, is awarded biannually for outstanding international photography. It is financed by German-American photographer Ellen Auerbach’s estate, which has been entrusted to the Akademie der Künste.
Joanna Piotrowska (b. 1985 in Warsaw) currently lives and works in London. She studied photography at the Royal College of Art in London and the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Among other venues, her works have been shown at the Biennale di Venezia (2022), the Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon (2022), the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018) and in the group show “Being: New Photography 2018” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Piotrowska’s solo exhibitions include presentations of her work at the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2022), the Stiftung Insel Hombroich / Raketenstation (2021), the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2020), Tate Britain, London (2019) and the Kunsthalle Basel (2019). Piotrowska has received the Lewis Baltz Research Fund Award and the MACK First Book Award, among other distinctions.
Juliane Bischoff studied Sociology in Vienna, Dresden and Helsinki with a focus on Visual Sociology and Art Sociology. Currently she works as curator at the NS-documentation centre Munich. From 2019 until 2020 she co-curated the much noticed exhibition “Tell me about yesterday tomorrow” together with Nicolaus Schafhausen and Mirjam Zadoff. Before, she worked at Kunsthalle Basel, Kunsthalle Vienna and the Goethe-Institute New York. In January 2022, the digital exhibition project “Departure Neuaubing. European Histories of Forced Labor” was released, which she edited together with Paul-Moritz Rabe at the NS-documentation centre Munich. From 2023 on, she will curate the programme at Klosterruine Berlin.
Baal & Mortimer is the project of A. Grübler, sonically exploring the spaces between sound and image, language and body, matter and speculation. After the debut album Deixis via Bureau B (2020) and The Torso Tapes EP via Italic (2021), she released the album Con-Struct via Bureau B in September 2022, working with the extensive sound archives of electronic music pioneer Conrad Schnitzler. Baal & Mortimer was the mentee of Laurel Halo in the Berlin Amplify program in 2018.