Award Winners

Pe Lang

This year’s main prize of the Pax Art Awards goes to Pe Lang (*1974). The artist began his career in experimental music production, where his sound projects attracted attention in the 1990s. When his focus shifted to visual art, his skills in electronics and computer programming accompanied him. A profound fascination for the laws of physics is palpable in Pe Lang’s minimal and kinetic installations, which explore and harness the properties of the machinery and materials they involve.

While technology is frequently viewed through the lens of its negative consequences in relation to consumer society, surveillance or environmental pollution, Pe Lang’s work turns to its naturally inherent properties and mechanics, revealing technology’s matterof-fact innocence and poetry. His set-ups, which sometimes invite physical engagement from the observer, show how physical laws of our natural world can produce both haphazard and playful audio-visual results. Embarking from seemingly banal questions, the self-contained, almost self-sustaining universes Pe Lang creates draw our attention to remarkable systems of unfamiliar equilibrium and revelatory disparity.

The jury was impressed by the distinctive and consistent development of the artist’s oeuvre, which now spans three decades. His works are characterised by clear compositions that conceal nothing. Taking an almost scientific approach, Pe Lang Pe Lang continuously poses new questions of form, colour, space, rhythm and sound. With the subtle whirring of their engines, the sensual rustling of paper, the flashing coloured stripes or the microscopic rippling of silicon dots, his works hold a magical and poetic quality capable of enchanting their viewers.

Awards

Exhibitions

Johanna Bruckner

Awards

Erste Bank ExtraVALUE Art Award | Anerkennungspreis für Bildende Kunst des Landes Niederösterreich | re:humanism Prize for Art & Artificial Intelligence | Istituto Svizzero Visual Arts Fellowship | City of Zurich studio scholarship for Genoa | Work Scholarship of the City of Zurich SWISSNEX Production Award | Jan Van Eyck Academie Grant

Exhibitions

Jennifer Merlyn Scherler

Jennifer M Scherler, My Internet Is Not Your Internet But My Reality, still 3

Jennifer Merlyn Scherler’s (*1996) work explores issues of intimacy, identity, gender fluidity, self-image and nostalgia through various (not exclusively digital) formats and media, ranging from video, lecture performance, sound, installation, photography and poetry.

Investigating internet culture and setting a spotlight on cultural behaviours, Scherler reveals how offline structures of cultural dominance are mirrored in the digital sphere. It is common to assume that the internet provides everyone with an objective and ever accessible infrastructure, however this contrasts with the reality experienced by people, especially groups, outside the political mainstream due to their identity, profession or geographical location. Scherler reflects on strategies employed by marginalised communities to circumvent the mechanisms of exclusion and claim their presence in digital spaces. Their works integrate a multitude of collective identities and their various strategies of living, grieving and remembering. Incorporating fantasy worlds, pop cultural references, footage and content drawn from the internet, and combining them with personal reflections and textual fragments, Scherler creates captivating narratives that invite critical reflection on contemporary internet culture.

The jury was impressed by Scherler’s manner of addressing complex social issues in their work, achieving both substantive depth and a persuasive aesthetic and form.

Awards

Nominated for Aeschlimann-Corti stipend | Nominated for Bally Artist Award

Exhibitions