Exile Visual Arts Award

2024 award winner

Jalal Maghout (born 1987 in Syria) is an animation filmmaker who has been living in Germany since 2013. He submitted his 13-minute animated film ‘HAVE A NICE DOG!’ as his master’s thesis at the Film University Babelsberg in 2020. It is based on Maghout’s own experiences of the war in Damascus and is a psychodrama about a man for whom the supposed normality that people in a city surrounded by bombing increasingly try to maintain seems increasingly absurd.

He increasingly loses himself in fantasies of escape and inner dialogues with his dog Baroud. After almost all of his friends have already fled, the protagonist imagines ways out of his desperate situation in sometimes surreal images. Fear is palpable and drives him into isolation. Only his dog is his confidant. But unlike its master, the animal does not hide its feelings.

The jury’s statement

The jury praises the film’s narrative and visual power, which unfolds in a captivating way. In nightmarish images and worlds that flow seamlessly into one another, the film asks when exile actually begins: only when you leave your homeland or even before that, when you have to make the existential decision: to stay or to go?

Maghout’s film breaks the subject down to the individual, to the inner process. The vibrant, hand-drawn and then digitally animated images aptly reflect the protagonist’s restlessness and hint at the ordeal that inner and outer exile entails. The calm narrative voice and the excellent sound design further intensify the oppressive feeling when watching and make ‘HAVE A NICE DOG!’ a deeply touching, stirring work of art.

2023 award winner

Farkhondeh Shahroudi has been living in exile in Germany since 1990. Much of her work reflects her artistic exploration of revolution, war and flight. This also applies to her two award-winning works, which were presented by the jury as follows:

The work ‘Sky is no one’s ground’ (2019) consists of a flag with appliqués and embroidery on velvet. As part of a performance, the artist places her own body on a pedestal as part of the artwork and waves the flag for several minutes. In doing so, she draws on her own time as an activist in Iran in the 1970s. The performance is reminiscent of traditional Shiite rituals as well as modern forms of revolutionary protest. By applying a poem to the flag and embroidering it, Shahroudi transforms it into an ‘anti-flag’ – a poetic, deterritorialised banner that describes the experiences of flight and exile.

The work ‘Max Beckmann war nicht hier’ (2019) is of similar materiality: The title of the work is written in large letters on a banner – a reference to the German artist Max Beckmann, who fled into exile in 1937. In 2017, Shahroudi was a scholarship holder at the Villa Romana in Florence and, while researching earlier artists, discovered that Max Beckmann had also worked in this studio. She shares with him the experience of living in exile, and so begins an imaginary pen friendship with Beckmann. This culminates in an extensive series of drawings and the velvet banner bearing the first sentence of this examination of – as Shahroudi puts it – her ‘double’: ‘Max Beckmann was not here’.

The jury’s statement

The jury praised the high complexity of Shahroudi’s works: by linking the poetically transformed flag with the expansive performance, the artist gives powerful expression to her own experiences of exile in ‘Sky is no one’s ground’. She symbolises rootedness and connection as well as detachment and inner turmoil. Her work ‘Max Beckmann war nicht hier’ (Max Beckmann was not here) also uses a banner from the Shiite tradition to represent a multi-layered connection between continuity, flight and exile – both historical and current. Those who have been displaced cannot be here – and yet they are, through their immortalisation in art.