The Evens Arts Prize 2017
The international jury of seven experts in the field of art and culture decided to award the Evens Arts Prize 2017 to Els Dietvorst, a Belgian visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Duncormick, County Wexford, Ireland. While mainly a filmmaker, she also uses drawing, writing and sculpture. The laureate has been selected from a total of 16 candidates working in the fields of visual and performing arts.
The artist’s website states: “Els Dietvorst is an artist whose work focuses on communication, collaboration and social conflicts. She collects scraps and fragments of the world and models them, films them, draws them, tells their story in images. Not so much to point out certain abuses and even less to save the world through art, but above all to provide something to hold on to for herself and the spectator, to create order where there was chaos and through the enumerated reality to hold up a mirror that allows us to tune in to the universal everydayness, to the common, to that which in a mad world is increasingly considered uncommon.” For more information, visit www.elsdietvorst.be.
Her work has been shown and supported by art institutions and festivals such as the Kaaitheatre, Brussels, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, and Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp, and has been shown internationally in New York, Utrecht, Casablanca, London and Vienna.
The award ceremony took place on May 29, 2017 at Bozar in Brussels, followed by the screening of the laureate’s film “The Rabbit and the Teasel”.
The Jury for the Evens Arts Prize 2017
Michal Chacinski, Polish cultural critic, journalist, television and film producer
Annie Cohen-Solal, academic and writer, curator of exhibitions for the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Musée Picasso and the Musée de l’Immigration in Paris
Dobrila Denegri, art historian and independent curator; artistic director of the Center of Contemporary Art in Torun, Poland
Paul Dujardin, CEO and artistic director of Bozar, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Italian artist and art theorist
Andrea Rose, former director of Visual Arts at the British Council; board member, UNESCO Cultural Commission; chair of the Selection Committee for the International Venice Biennale of Art and Architecture
Gottfried Wagner, freelance culture consultant;former special envoy for international cultural-political projects, Austrian Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture; former director of the European Cultural Foundation
The jury was chaired by Ernest Van Buynder, board member of the Evens Foundation and former chair of the Museum for Contemporary Art in Antwerp (M HKA).