The Golden Lion for Best National Participation and other Awards of the 57th Venice Biennale

The Awards Ceremony of the 57th Exhibition were given on May 13th 2017 at Ca’ Giustinian.

The Golden Lion for Best National Participation goes to Germany “for a powerful and disturbing installation that poses urgent questions about our time. It pushes the spectator to a state of anxiety.  An original response to the architecture of the pavilion, Imhof’s work is also characterized by precise decisions about objects, images, bodies and sounds.”

Special mention as National Participation to Brazil for an installation which “produces an enigmatic and unbalanced space in which we cannot feel secure. Both the structure of the installation and the video by Cinthia Marcelle in partnership with filmmaker Tiago Mata Machado evoke the concerns of contemporary Brazilian society”.

Golden Lion for the Best Artist to Franz Erhard Walther “for his work, which brings together forms, colour, fabrics, sculpture, performance and continues to activate the viewer in engaging ways; for the radical and complex nature of his oeuvre that has an impact on our time and suggests a way of living in transit”.

Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist to Hassan Kahn for “the special and intimate relationship that his work establishes with the spectator, to whom he suggests a connection between voice, sound and the horizon. His Composition for a Public Park creates an immersive experience which beautifully intertwines the political and the poetic”.

There are two Special Mentions awarded to the following artists:
Charles Atlas, “for two videos of great visual splendour and sophisticated editing in which images of natural and artificial beauty are joined to words addressing questions of austerity and frustration, sexuality and class”.

Petrit Halilaj, “for imaginative interventions in the architecture of the Arsenale and Central Pavilion, which create relationships between the history of Kosovo and childhood memories”.