Birgit Jürgenssen Award Winner 2022: Anca Benera

The jury of experts honour an artist whose projects deal with pressing questions of the time, impress with their complexity and multidisciplinarity and manifest themselves in different media, materials and formats including installation, video and performance. The prize is awarded annually to a student of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in cooperation with the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Public Service and Sport (BMKÖS) and the Hubert Winter Gallery.

The Birgit Jürgenssen Prize has been awarded annually since 2004 in memory of the artist Birgit Jürgenssen, who formerly taught at the Academy. The award is presented in cooperation with the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Public Service and Sport and the Hubert Winter Gallery to a student of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna for work in the fields of video or (digital) media art, drawing, artistic photography, sculpture, but also painting.

Jury statement

The jury has awarded the Birgit Jürgenssen Award 2022 to Anca Benera. It thus honours an artist whose projects deal with pressing issues of the time, impress with their complexity and multidisciplinarity, and manifest themselves in different media, materials and formats including installation, video and performance. Anca Benera's work is research-oriented and the relationship between history and the environment, climate and ecology, as well as the questioning of the politics of resources are the focus of her projects, which she has often pursued over several years and which she has been developing since 2011, mostly together with Arnold Estefan.

The works of the awardee convince both with well-founded scientific research and with successful installation settings that are reminiscent of real mining scenarios and prospecting, while poetically alluding to more abstract concerns such as the joint use of public space, the protection of resources and the ecological balance, thus also carrying subtle activist potential.

In one of her most recent works, the video installation Blue Ground, 2021 - ongoing, Anca Benera adopts a decolonial perspective by making connections between the overexploitation of the Namibian landscape through diamond mining and shipbuilding in Romania. In the film, the diamond becomes a symbol of the boundary between human and technological relations to the landscape. Examining the hidden patterns behind historical, social and geopolitical narratives, the artist creates excellent research-led art that engages viewers and invites reflection.

Her starting point, her independent perspective, her consistent artistic style, her clear position, but also the renegotiation of artistic practice make her a convincing awardee, an artist whose future oeuvre promises exciting things.