Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2018: Adrian Piper

1 Sept – 14 Oct 2018
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin
Tue – Sun 11 am – 7 pm, admission: EUR 6/4
Free admission for under 19s and Tuesdays from 3 pm

Award ceremony and exhibition opening: Friday, 31 Aug 2018, 7 pm, free admission
Laudation: Helmut Draxler

Adrian Piper is the recipient of this year's Käthe Kollwitz Prize presented by Akademie der Künste. With this award, the Akademie is honouring an international artist and analytical philosopher, who has profoundly influenced American conceptual art since the mid-1960s. Piper has expanded the spectrum of conceptual art and first-generation minimalism to include issues such as gender and race, thereby questioning the political conditions for artistic production processes as well as their reception and meaning. Her former statement, "the power of art is unlimited for social change", has lost none of its strength or relevance. Her design language and the poetry it contains also appeal to an audience who are less appreciative of conceptual art.

The prize has a value of EUR 12,000 and will be presented on 31 August 2018 in Berlin. To coincide with the award ceremony, Akademie der Künste will curate an exhibition at Pariser Platz featuring selected site-specific works by Adrian Piper.

Adrian Piper (*1948 in New York) has lived and worked in Berlin since 2005, where she runs the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. Her artistic works, including works on paper, videos, multimedia installations, paintings, audio works, photographic and text-based graphics, have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Generali Foundation in Vienna. She has been awarded fellowships from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Adrian Piper received the Skowheagan Medal for Sculptural Installation and the New York Dance & Performance Award. In 2015, she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for "The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–3". In 2017, this installation and performance was recreated at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin. Her "Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016" exhibition can currently be viewed at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

In her academic career as a philosopher, Adrian Piper gained a doctorate from Harvard University in the early 1980s with a thesis on rationality supervised by John Rawls. Her studies of Immanuel Kant took her to Germany, to Heidelberg University. Piper taught at several US universities and her many philosophy papers have focussed on meta-ethics, Kant and the history of ethics.

A publication will accompany the exhibition.

With the kind support of the Cologne Kreissparkasse which funds the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne.