Honours

The Jury of the Hans and Lea Grundig Prize is delighted to honour Cana Bilir-Meier with the prize in the Visual Arts category. 

In her films, performances and installations, Cana Bilir-Meier (born 1986 in Munich) demonstrates a deep and continuous commitment to addressing the most pressing issues of our time through visual and textual means.

In her latest exhibition „Stop. Listen. Encounter„, curated by Chana Boekle, Bilir-Meier realised a temporary public sculpture in Dortmund in collaboration with the HSD – Hochschule Düsseldorf, local initiatives and residents. In this work, she uses the aesthetic language of traffic signs to give victims of right-wing, racist and anti-Semitic violence a space in public space.

The jury particularly emphasised Bilir-Meier’s powerful artistic commitment to social and political issues in Germany as well as her unique work at the interface of art and activism. For over a decade, Bilir-Meier has stood for the personal and artistic commitment of victims of discrimination, injustice and violence. As the niece of Semra Ertan, who self-immolated in Hamburg in protest against systemic racism in Germany, Bilir-Meier was co-editor of the bilingual poetry collection ‘Mein Mein Name ist Ausländer | Benim Adım Yabancı’’ (2020), which for the first time publishes texts by Ertan that were not published during his lifetime. 
Avi Feldmann/Haleh Redjajan

The jury awarded this year’s prize in the art education category to Henryk Gericke for his project ‘tapetopia – GDR Undergroundtapes’. Gericke, born in 1964 in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, has been working for six years on this series of cassettes and records, which rescues a specific art form ‘in the niche’, namely the GDR subculture of the 1980s, from oblivion. 

The recordings of avant-garde, punk and post-punk bands and artists were created as ‘underground art’ outside of the state-run GDR media companies and distribution channels, recorded privately and reproduced on commercially available cassettes, passed on by hand, under the pressure of persecution by the SED security apparatus. There was an inherent moment of ephemerality and precariousness. The artistic networks, structures and alliances of the ‘GDR underground’ were largely destroyed by departures, persecution and bans in the 1980s.

With his edition, which he is publishing – self-financed, with texts in German and English translation – Gericke is preserving the recordings and making them accessible for discussion in the present and future. As an artist who was himself part of the East Berlin subculture in Prenzlauer Berg, he is a recognised expert on the subject. He draws attention to an aspect of (East German) music history that often appears as a side note. The jury recognises Gericke’s work as an important contribution to (sub)cultural history, whose protagonists were ‘unwanted children of the GDR state’, and also to the critical examination of the failed state-socialist attempt. 
Klaus Lederer