SKOVVEJ .- This year’s winners of The ARKEN Prize and Travel Grants offer grand narratives scattered in a thousand parts, vulnerable spelling mistakes and playful urban spaces. On 19 March the prizes were awarded for the tenth time in a festive presentation at ARKEN.

This year’s recipient of the ARKEN Prize of DKK 100,000 was Danh Vo, while the two travel grants of DKK 50,000 went to Gudrun Hasle and Karoline H Larsen. The ARKEN Art Prize and Travel Grant are donated by Annie & Otto Johs. Detlefs’ Philanthropic Foundation.

The grand narrative split into atoms
The Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo (b. 1975) is one of the really big names on the contemporary art scene. His works are exhibited all over the world, and this year he represents Denmark at the Venice Biennale. Danh Vo works with personal documents, found objects, photography and sculp¬ture which refers to the past and our shared cultural heritage. As in an unsolved jigsaw puzzle, however, the pieces are never assembled. The fragmentary form of the work is a point that Danh Vo associates with the fundamental condition of modern humanity. A central issue is how identities are created and influenced by political, religious and cultural circumstances. By splitting structures apart, Danh Vo opens his works up for broader reflection over how personal memory is entangled with collective history.

ARKEN’s director Christian Gether says: “Danh Vo is awarded the ARKEN Art Prize 2015 for his works, which with great clear-sightedness and insight enable us to uncover power relations and social structures that we take for granted.

With his works Danh Vo points to mechanisms that help to give objects and stories an iconic status in our collective and personal memory. In this way the works make us wiser about the world we are a part of.”

Vulnerable spelling mistakes
Gudrun Hasle (b. 1979) works in many different media. Through embroidery, photography, video, drawing and performance she grapples with the difficult sides and taboo subjects of life with a starting point in her own life experience. Despite – or perhaps even because of – her dyslexia, writing is a recurring ele-ment in Gudrun Hasle’s work. The result is raw-nerved, honest evidence and small everyday observations of a diary-like character, strewn with the characte-ristic spelling errors that emphasize the degree of intimacy, vulnerability and human presence in the project. Gudrun Hasle receives the ARKEN Travel Grant 2015 for her works, which deal with the position of the marginalized and the outsiders of society through her own personal history. In this way the works reflect a number of more general conditions for modern humanity.

Playful urban spaces
Karoline H Larsen (b. 1974) creates participation-based performances and tempo¬rary interventions in public space which challenge the form and normal usage of urban space. By cutting across habitual paths, Karoline H Larsen’s works force us to stop and discover the city anew. The passers-by and invited participants are active players in the creation of the work, and new relations arise as the places change their appearance. Karoline H Larsen receives the ARKEN Travel Grant 2015 for her extraordinary ability to involve people in collective actions which bring people closer together in an informal, playful way and challenge the way we act in public space.