COPENHAGEN.- The Beckett Foundation and
Copenhagen Contemporary announced the winner of the Beckett Prize 2023: the Danish artist Jane Jin Kaisen. The award is a recognition of her ground-breaking artistic work which, through filmic works, navigates the intersection between lived experience, embodied knowledge and political narratives. The prize comes with a grant of DKK 250,000.
In collaboration with CC, the Beckett Prize is given annually to a visual artist working in Denmark who has made an original contribution to the arts. An essential criterion for the award is that the artist, over a significant number of years, has developed a personal artistic language distinguished by qualities such as humanism, conceptual precision, skilled execution and immersion in materials and effects.
CC's director Marie Laurberg states on behalf of the jury: "Over the course of two decades Jane Jin Kaisen has created a unique oeuvre characterized by her visually stunning films that combine storytelling, spirituality and music. Her work is imbued with a strong intersectional and feminist voice, continuously advocating freedom.
In her work she builds bridges between historical narratives from her native South Korea and experiences of transnational adoption and racialization. The great appeal of Jin Kaisen's work is her sensitive approach to highly complex issues, which speaks to her strong artistic integrity. Jane Jin Kaisen has been unanimously chosen by the jury, and we are proud to award her the Beckett Prize 2023."
Jane Jin Kaisen
Jane Jin Kaisen (born in 1980 on Jeju Island, South Korea, living in Copenhagen) is a visual artist, filmmaker and professor at the School of Media Arts, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Jin Kaisen's artistic practice spans video installation, experimental film, photography, performance and text. Her work is rooted in extensive interdisciplinary research, long-term collaborations and engagement with minority communities. She is known for her visually striking, poetic and polyphonic works that connect the past and the present. Addressing issues of memory, migration, borders and translation, she activates the field where lived experience and embodied knowledge intersect with larger political narratives.
Through year-long projects Jin Kaisen has addressed topics such as transnational adoption, gender and militarism, the Korean War, the Jeju Massacre (1947-54) and the effects of the Cold War.
Moreover, Jin Kaisen repeatedly focuses on nature and oceanic cultures, cosmologies, feminist retellings of myths, and an engagement in ritual and spiritual practices.
She operates at the threshold between media and forms, disciplines and sensibilities, and her works negotiate the means of representation, resistance and recognition. In so doing, she outlines the contours of possible alternative kinships and sites of collective manifestation.
Beckett Prize jury
As part of the jury for this year's Beckett Prize, CC and the Beckett Foundation have appointed a number of prominent curators from leading European institutions who, for the next four years, will help select the prize winners: Cliff Lauson (Director of Exhibitions, Somerset House, London), María Berríos (Head of Curatorial Programmes and Research at MACBA, Barcelona), Hendrik Folkerts (Curator of International Art and Head of Exhibitions, Moderna Museet, Stockholm) and Marie Laurberg (Director, Copenhagen Contemporary).
With its choice of jury, CC and the Beckett Foundation want to raise international awareness of contemporary Danish art and entrench the position of the Beckett Prize in a strong professional network. The honorary award will help to showcase and promote the Danish art scene's great talents internationally.
Last year the Beckett Prize was awarded for the first time; the winner was Cathrine Raben Davidsen whose compelling and dreamy paintings form a unique and personal artistic universe, exploring life, death, transformation and metamorphosis.
