With the SPECIAL RECOGNITION AWARD, INNSBRUCK INTERNATIONAL has established a platform to place emerging artists with a connection to Tyrol in an international context and to support their development and professional growth. The award also facilitates the production and presentation of new work. Previous recipients include Heidrun Sandbichler (2016), Addie Wagenknecht (2018), Julia Rhomberg (2020) and Michael Strasser (2022).
Initiated by the biennial and designed by Swarovski Kristallwelten, the INNSBRUCK INTERNATIONAL SPECIAL RECOGNITION AWARD 2024 will be granted to artist Sophie Gogl.
The 2024 biennial brings together artistic perspectives from the field of activism, exemplified by their formal and performative approaches under the theme of HEAVEN CAN WAIT. Philipp Fleischmann, for example, deconstructs slides to create new, light-flooded visual universes, while Tue Greenfort devises floating, artificial survival scenarios and Doris Uhlich explores ways to reach the sun from Earth. This small selection already shows the criteria under which the artists were invited to participate in HEAVEN CAN WAIT and how their works, many of which are new creations, were tailored to the audience’s everyday experiences. In terms of content, the goal was to explore the added value that a counterpart, be it art, humans, animals, everyday life, nature, objects, politics, etc., can offer when it is actively engaged in dialogue rather than being appropriated or undervalued. With this approach, time no longer flows in a linear fashion but seems to stop for a moment, which, in turn, makes room for something new. It allows us to pause so that the future may wait a little longer. In a moment like this, «time» gives rise to something new and changes course or perspective toward a new direction.
INNSBRUCK INTERNATIONAL believes that the young artist Sophie Gogl captures this moment brilliantly and brings it into our everyday lives: With her appropriation art, Sophie Gogl, born in Kitzbühel in 1992, captures our attention. Her work humorously unveils our mechanisms and illusions, compelling us to see things from a new perspective. The painter and sculptor derives many of her images from films, advertising, and memes. She is less interested in the actual subject matter than in the mechanisms by which these images appear and disappear and with which we are confronted on a daily basis. In the context of INNSBRUCK INTERNATIONAL 2024, Sophie Gogl found inspiration for this kind of artistic translation in a lost glove pinned to a coat rack in the Café Central. This initial spark led her to explore stories of anti/heroes, debates about colonialism and the question of what we truly fear. Based on these stories and questions, her work will be presented in the form of a new work at the Café Central in Innsbruck and Ambras Castle.
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