Lifetime Achievement Award

Joan Jonas
Over the course of four decades, Joan Jonas has created a consistently unique body of work, establishing herself as a pioneering force in the genres of body art, performance, and video art. Within this expanded field of production—which also includes drawing, film, installation, photography, and sculpture—Jonas has systematically investigated the structures of time and space that govern our physical world, and the place of the perceiving subject within them. All the while she has also remained deeply engaged with the cultural realms of myth, folklore, and history, and how identity, especially feminine identity, plays a role in these constructions.

Getting her start in New York’s downtown art scene of the 1960s, Jonas—like her artistic peers—set out to rethink the status of the artwork in the wake of Pop art and Minimalism. Adopting the idea of art-as-process, Jonas turned to performance, systematically yet intuitively exploring every aspect of how live events could be structured. She moved outdoors, emphasizing the physical properties of sound and vision in real space, and used mirrors to reverse her audience’s gaze, turning spectators into spectacle. Delving into new technology, she forged bold paths for a phenomenology of video, in all its permutations. She donned costumes and appropriated folkloric traditions, unearthing forgotten archetypes of the feminine just as the women’s movement gained power. By the early 1980s Jonas had begun to create complex, nonlinear narratives premised on literary and historical texts, reaching back to medieval Icelandic sagas, the work of the poet H.D., and, more recently, the writings and biography of famed art historian Aby Warburg.

Jonas has been the subject of several major retrospectives organized by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; and the Queens Museum of Art, Flushing, New York. She has performed and exhibited her work extensively, working internationally with institutions too numerous to list, and collaborating with such contemporaries as the Wooster Group. Most recently, she presented her multimedia installation Reading Dante at this year’s Venice Biennale to much critical acclaim.

Kasper Koenig
From the age of 23, when he was invited to organize a show of work by Claes Oldenburg at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Kasper König has been curating groundbreaking contemporary exhibitions in his native Germany and around the globe. Among his outstanding contributions to the field, König cofounded Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1977, realizing proposals by Richard Serra, Joseph Beuys, Ulrich Rukriem, Claes Oldenburg, Carl Andre, Richard Long, and Donald Judd, and returned to curate the once-a-decade undertaking in 1987, 1997, and 2007 to great critical acclaim. In these seminal projects, König has been instrumental in promoting experiments in site-specific practice and expanding the notion of how art can function in public spaces.

In the 1970s, Kasper was a tireless editor for the influential Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which published artists’ books by Hans Haacke, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Reich, and Michael Snow, among numerous other artists. After returning to Germany to teach at the renowned Academy of the Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, he served as professor and later president of the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where he also became the founding director of the exhibition space Portikus. König’s boundless dedication to contemporary art continues today at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, where he has served as director since 2000, overseeing a rigorous program that encompasses commissions and major loan shows as well as installations of the institution’s world-class permanent collection. As König has said, "The museum should be used, not visited, as it belongs to everyone and no-one."

Over the course of his prolific career, König has organized important monographic exhibitions on Michael Asher, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol, among many others. Large-scale curatorial tour de forces are König’s specialty, as demonstrated in ambitious projects such as Westkunst in 1981 at the Cologne Fair, von hier aus in 1984 at the Düsseldorf Fair, Der zerbrochene Spiegel (with Hans Ulrich Obrist) in 1993 in Vienna and Hamburg, and In-Between Architecture (with Wilfried Dickhoff) in 2000 for the Hanover Expo.