ROTTERDAM.- The exhibition featuring the 2016 Dolf Henkes Award nominees – Daan Botlek, Rana Hamadeh, Rory Pilgrim, and Katarina Zdjelar – opened on Thursday 15 December. The biennial prize of €12,000 is awarded by the Henkes Foundation to an iconic Rotterdam artist. The winner is announced on Thursday 9 February 2017.

Daan Botlek (1977, Vlaardingen) makes drawings, illustrations, and monumental wall paintings in which the human figure is a recurring motif. His work is realised in an urban setting – the city’s facades and abandoned buildings – which he manipulates through plays of perspective and proportion. He makes humorous images using clear contours, often incorporating elements of the surroundings. At TENT, he makes a new monumental wall painting that, in combination with spatial objects, inventively plays with the space.

The films, performances, and text posters of Rory Pilgrim (1988, Bristol) are based on group meetings, through which, with a wide variety of people, he creates space for dialogue and the exchange of experience. He uses words and music as an important agent for change and action, striving to impart renewed meaning in hollowed-out terms such as freedom, happiness, empowerment, and love. At TENT, he creates a cosmos derived from the latest instalment of his Sacred Repositories film cycle. This iteration, called Affection Is the Best Protection, concentrates on love and the experiences of LGBT communities in Almere, Russia, and Senegal.

Rana Hamadeh (1983, Rachkida) develops long-term research projects that lead her audiences through the infrastructures of justice, militarism, histories of sanitation and theatre. Spanning performances, stage-sets, cartographic works and writings, her work brings together a diversity of histories, geographies, philosophies and fictions. In TENT she will present a part of her ongoing project Alien Encounters, in which she thinks through state-sponsored forms of violence and the legal apparatuses that enable them.

The videos of Katarina Zdjelar (1979, Belgrade) are based on an equal dialogue between moving image and sound. The way language works regarding issues such as identity, authority or community plays a major role in this. The performers in her works undergo language-related exercises or training, the effort and complexity of which exposes language’s complexity and mechanisms. As such, her latest work depicts a young woman simultaneously singing four musical pieces without losing the rhythm, tempo, and style of each individual work.

At the request of the Rotterdam artist Dolf Henkes (1903-1989), part of his legacy is intended as a prize to support prominent Rotterdam artists. Previous winners were Jeroen Eisinga, Erik van Lieshout, Melvin Moti, Lara Almarcegui, Gyz La Rivière, and Lidwien van de Ven. The Dolf Henkes Award is an initiative of the Henkes Foundation. The foundation aims to enable a favourable art climate in Rotterdam.

The jury nominated the artists and consists of Alexander Ramselaar (collector), Lidwien van de Ven (artist and winner of the 2014 Dolf Henkes Prize), David Bade (artist and co-founder Instituto Buena Bista in Curacao), Noor Mertens (curator), and Niels Post (artist and co-founder Trendbeheer).

The 2016 Dolf Henkes Award exhibition runs until 19 February 2017