2019

Mary-Audrey Ramirez

Born in 1990 in Luxembourg-City, lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

“Artist Mary-Audrey Ramirez (who goes by m33hr13 when gaming) is a textile-based artist who investigates the social constructs of online worlds and the symbolic violence that is embedded in game-space”, says art critic and curator Kate Brown. “She creates new interpretations of femininity at the intersection of craft theory and gamer ideology. […] In her material work, Ramirez plays on haptic surfaces. There’s yarn on linen, embroidery paintings, and pillow-soft sculptures that frequently recur. Again, the presumption may be that these materials are a far cry from game worlds’ digital matter. However, Ramirez helps us see the role-playing malleability of sewn material. Though her imagery hails from online theatres and often represents the brutal action that can take place there, she finds a cozy landing pad for these themes in plush synthetics.”

Animals are omnipresent in Ramirez’s artistic universe, and art critic Leonie Pfennig explains: “Each of Mary-Audrey Ramirez’s animal sculptures is an attempt to understand the nature of human beings and to comment on their behaviour. When she invests animals with functions - the woodpecker, that can be strapped soothingly to the chest, the little lamb with its sewed-on gloves, screaming innocently for kindness and affection, or the ray embracing the torso like a protecting shield - much is revealed about deeply rooted human desires and needs”.

Mary-Audrey Ramirez was nominated by Kevin Muhlen, Casino Luxembourg - Forum d’art contemporain and Fanny Weinquin, independant curator.

Nora Wagner

Born in 1989 in Luxembourg-City, lives and works in Luxembourg.

“Be somewhere”, says Nora Wagner in her artist’s statement, and the emphasis is as much on “being”, the embodied, the sensory and intellectual presence, as on the places or spaces that she invests with her work. Site and context, or, in one word, situation is key to her artistic practice. Not surprisingly, she likes to play and to experiment with what she finds along the way. Every stick and every stone, every object, big or small, and every human encounter is an invitation to act and to re-act.

And so, “somewhere” can be anywhere. The places that Nora Wagner inhabits with her installations and performances are varied and go far beyond the canonic art spaces. She will roam the European continent with a portable studio to connect with fellow artists through a Nomad Workshop (2015). She explores art off the beaten path, literally, organizing a walk through the woods, as a pilgrimage culminating in a guerrilla exhibition (The Walk 2016). She asks questions, playing the part of an ethnographer doing fieldwork, a participant observer engaging the public in a very personal way. Thus, her exhibitions become evolutive and co-constitutive acts of inspiring, vital energy (Élan Vital 2018).

Nora Wagner aims at turning art and culture into a part of everyday life. Here, words, texts and poetry play an important part too. They weave through her work like a delicate thread, an ongoing conversation that she sustains with the world around her.

Nora Wagner was nominated by Marlène Kreins - Galeries d’art de la Ville de Dudelange, Luxembourg.