Meeting in Berlin last Tuesday, the jury for the 2009 ADKV-ART COLOGNE Prize for Art Criticism awarded this year’s prize to Dr. Jennifer Allen, a Canadian critic living in Berlin. In making the award, the jury particularly highlighted the clear personal viewpoints expressed in Allen’s writing and its vivid and visual style. She is the tenth recipient of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Kunstvereine (ADKV) award, which honors the work of freelance art critics, giving recognition to decisive contribution they make to the public reception of contemporary art. Since 2006, the prize has been awarded in cooperation with ART COLOGNE.
Jennifer Allen studied economics and literature at McGill University, receiving a PhD in literature from the Université de Montréal in 1998. She has lived in Berlin since 1996, when she came to the city on a DAAD fellowship. She has worked as a freelance critic since 2001, in addition to giving seminars and lectures at numerous European universities, including the Humboldt University (Berlin), the Collège international de philosophie (Paris) and the IASPIS-International Artists Studio Program (Stockholm).
Dr. Allen writes in English and French, and more recently in German. Her articles and reviews have appeared in international publications including Artforum (New York), Afterall (London), Les Temps Modernes (Paris), De Witte Raaf (Brussels) and Parkett (Zürich/New York). She writes a regular column for the magazines Frieze (London), MOUSSE (Milan), and the website Openspace (Moscow). In the German press, her pieces have appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), the tageszeitung (Berlin) and ZITTY (Berlin). In addition, she is a regular contributor to numerous German-language journals, recently in Lettre International (Berlin), and publishes widely in catalogs.
This year’s prize goes to an author who has firmly established herself in the international art critical arena, while nonetheless remaining committed to bringing unorthodox and less established artistic positions to wider attention. “Her texts have a very strong personal viewpoint, they are convincingly argued and communicate, in a lucid and vivid way, the author’s personal take on contemporary art,” noted the jury’s commendation. The jury explicitly drew attention to the refreshingly individual style of Dr. Allen’s art criticism: even in linguistic terms, they noted, she had carved out her own position, rather than giving into the ubiquitous “service journalism” of the contemporary art scene.
This year marks the first time the ADKV-ART COLOGNE Prize for Art Criticism has invited direct submissions. A total of 25 authors from Germany and overseas submitted portfolios of work. The jury, who decided on the basis of these submissions, included representatives from a variety of areas within the art world: Leonie Baumann (chair of the ADKV), Gerrit Gohlke (editor-in-chief of Artnet magazine), Sabine Groß (artist) and Catrin Lorch (art critic). The prize fund of €3000 was donated by ART COLOGNE.
The award ceremony will take place at 5pm on Thursday, April 23rd 2009, in the OPEN SPACE at ART COLOGNE.
In previous years, the Prize for Art Criticism has gone to Hans-Christian Dany (1999), Stefan Römer (2000), Jan Verwoert (2001), Renate Puvogel (2002), Raimar Stange (2003), Gregory Williams (2004), Dominic Eichler (2005), Catrin Lorch (2006), Ludwig Seyfarth (2007) and Rudolf Schmitz (2008).
Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Kunstvereine (ADKV)
www.kunstvereine.de
