Kitso Lynn Lelliott (Botswana) is the fourth recipient of the Henrike Grohs Art Award, conceived by the Goethe-Institut and Grohs family. She will be awarded with a 20 000€ cash prize and 10 000€ towards a publication of her work.

The runners-up of the award, Frederick Ebenezer Okai (Ghana) and Wambui Kamiru Collymore (Kenya) will each receive a cash prize of 5 000€. Congratulations to all three winners! For the fourth edition of the award, 690 applications from 40 African countries have been submitted, more than ever before.

The 2024 jury, who was made up of Marie Helene Pereira (senior curator, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany), Meriem Berrada (artistic director, MACAAL in Marrakech, Morocco) and Tandazani Dhlakama (curator at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town, South Africa), comment on their choice: “As the jury, we found ourselves drawn to artists thinking about personal collective histories; making work that expands and allows the viewer to experience different contexts in new and interesting ways. A common thread we found in the work of the selected artists is a robust research component that serves as the foundation for each artist’s work. We were impressed by the process of how the artists translate meaning from their personal contexts, to research and ultimately to artworks that get presented to various publics. The works refer to a lived experience and call for an engagement with different bodies, including the body of the viewer.

We recognise the artists’ strong commitment to re-anchoring knowledges beyond the conventional academic sphere. There is a notable effort to look back in order to move forward, finding anchors in different streams of existence. Frederick, Kitso and Wambui have demonstrated a keen awareness of their artistic identity and the power to navigate diverse influences.
Kitso’s work, in particular, resonated with us for its articulation of disobedience and disruption. There is a firm affirmation of the necessity to look beyond traditional references to colonial powers. Notably, in considering Kitso’s work, we view it not as a final achievement but as a constant state of becoming—a metaphor for the artist herself. Kitso embodies a perpetual reinvention, eschewing the notion of a finished work in favour of one that exists and re-exists, signifying a continuous and evolving artistic journey. We are thrilled to announce Kitso Lynn Lelliott as the winner of the 2024 Henrike Grohs Art Award.”

Watch video profiles of the top 3 artists here: www.henrikegrohsartaward.africa
Read about the top 21 shortlisted artists here.

Kitso Lynn Lelliott’s practice moves between video installation, film and writing. She is preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond epistemic power and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony. Her work interrogates the ‘real’ as it is shaped through contesting epistemologies, their narratives and the form these took over the Atlantic during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. Her work is an enactment of enunciating from elision and between historically subjugated subjectivities, privileging South-South relations in relation to yet imaginatively and epistemologically unmediated by the Global North. In 2017 she was laureate of the Iwalewahaus art award and was a featured guest artist at The Flaherty Seminar 2018. In 2019 Lelliott won the NIHSS award for best visual arts. She was with the CHR until 2022 when she took up a senior lectureship with the University of the Witwatersrand.