An­na Boghiguian (born 1946 in Cairo) will be award­ed the 30th Wolf­gang Hahn Prize of the Ge­sellschaft für Mod­erne Kunst at Mu­se­um Lud­wig. The award cer­e­mony will take place on Novem­ber 8, 2024, 6:30pm at Mu­se­um Lud­wig. 

The Egyp­tian-Ca­na­dian artist of Ar­me­nian ori­gin has pre­sent­ed one of the most exc­it­ing po­si­tions in con­tem­po­rary art since her par­ti­ci­pa­tion in the Bien­nials of Is­tan­bul in 2009 and of Shar­jah in 2011 and in dOC­U­MEN­TA 13 in 2012. She is known for her fig­u­ra­tive mu­rals, (note)books, draw­ings, paint­ings, pho­to­graphs, and sculp­tures, as well as some spec­tac­u­lar large-scale in­s­tal­la­tions. Boghiguian's work is of­ten spon­ta­neous and fre­quent­ly cre­at­ed on lo­ca­tion. She is con­sid­ered a per­cep­tive ob­serv­er of the hu­man con­di­tion and con­veys an in­ter­pre­ta­tion of con­tem­po­rary life in which her con­tent os­cil­lates ex­treme­ly clev­er­ly be­tween past and pre­sent, po­et­ry and politics, his­to­ry and lit­er­a­ture. Her art­works cele­brate a glob­al­ly unit­ed hu­mani­ty and fo­cus on the af­ter­math of his­tor­i­cal events and their con­flicts in or­der to iden­ti­fy op­tions for the fu­ture through an artis­tic reap­praisal.

Through a com­bi­na­tion of ver­bal and vi­su­al forms of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, her works have an im­me­di­ate and emo­tio­n­al ef­fect.The­mat­i­cal­ly, they com­bine the artist's pro­found his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge with her aware­ness for cur­rent de­bates, al­though in their ex­e­cu­tion they seem like an an­tith­e­sis to the op­tics of a tech­nol­o­gized dig­i­tal world. Boghiguian's unique artis­tic po­si­tion in ex­pres­sion and emo­tio­n­al­i­ty has not yet re­ceived the at­ten­tion in Ger­many that her au­then­tic ex­pres­sive­ness de­serves.

Car­o­lyn Chris­tov-Bakargiev, guest ju­ror, ex­plains about the nom­i­na­tion of An­na Boghiguian: “Her work’s po­et­ry and unique­ness as well as her di­rect­ness and ex­pres­siv­i­ty fit ide­al­ly in­to the Mu­se­um Lud­wig’s col­lec­tion with its strong ex­pres­sion­ist po­si­tions. An­na Boghiguian has been wide­ly rec­og­nized in­ter­na­tio­n­al­ly on­ly re­cent­ly, over the last ten years, so that this award is for a high­ly top­i­cal artist, rather than for a life­time achieve­ment. She is to­tal­ly con­tem­po­rary in her themes and in the con­nec­tions she draws through her read­ings, trav­els and in­ter­net search­es, be­tween his­tor­i­cal sto­ries and po­lit­i­cal and aes­thet­ic dis­cus­sions of our pre­sent world.”

"I am ex­treme­ly pleased that An­na Boghiguian will re­ceive the Wolf­gang Hahn Prize 2024. With her, an artist is hon­ored whose work is equal­ly po­lit­i­cal and po­et­ic. More­over, in her fig­u­ra­tive in­s­tal­la­tions, man­i­fold re­la­tion­ships can be estab­lished with 20th cen­tu­ry paint­ing in the Mu­se­um Lud­wig. If she were to make a new work for the mu­se­um, fol­low­ing her fun­da­men­tal artis­tic prac­tice, this would be ex­treme­ly grat­i­fy­ing and exc­it­ing," ex­plains Yil­maz Dziewior, Di­rec­tor of the Mu­se­um Lud­wig.

Mayen Beck­mann, Chair­wo­m­an of the Ge­sellschaft für Mod­erne Kunst, adds: "An­na Boghiguian is an artist who, with great fresh­ness and in­ter­na­tio­n­al­i­ty, finds im­ages that re­spond to our con­tem­po­rary problems and events and re­flect on the hu­man con­di­tion based on pre­cise his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge. Like a no­mad, she moves from ex­hi­bi­tion to bien­nial, us­ing the most hum­ble ma­te­rials, of­ten found on site, to make her ideas vis­i­ble in dif­fer­ent me­dia. This re­sults in the most vivid draw­ings and ex­pan­sive, text-lay­ered in­s­tal­la­tions. In th­ese, she re­veals her con­cerns, which ul­ti­mate­ly make all of our con­cerns and con­di­tio­n­al­i­ties vis­i­ble in an al­most sha­man­ic way."