Five artists are shortlisted for the BelgianArtPrize 2020: Agency, Sammy Baloji, Saddie Choua, Jacqueline Mesmaeker and Joëlle Tuerlinckx. The winner will be announced in May 2020 at an award ceremony at BOZAR.

Born in 1978 in Lubumbashi, Sammy Baloji is a visual artist and photographer, as well as the co-founder of the Picha Encounters, a photography and video biennial in Lubumbashi. Since 2005, he has been exploring the memory and history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work is a perpetual research into the cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the Katanga region, as well as a questioning of the effects of Belgian colonization. His videos and photographic series highlight how identities are shaped, transformed, perverted and reinvented.

Saddie Choua (1972, Bree, BE) lives and works in Brussels. She uses meta-documentary tactics, humor, own (film)material, re-appropriation and collage of popular intercultural formats and autobiographical elements to put racism, discrimination against women and class, and her cats in the spotlight. She creates a new pseudo-realistic imaginary world that is at once highly recognizable and utterly alien. It is her way of undermining the (visual) language of our media and sharpening the critical and political self-reflective gaze of her audience.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx (born in 1958 in Brussels) explores the notion of context (places, architecture) in all its dimensions (historical, political, cultural) and maintains an inextricably physical and conceptual relationship with space.

Jacqueline Mesmaeker, born in Uccle in 1929, lives and works in Brussels. Building on her early, experimental and creative work in architecture and design, and her career as a stylist from 1962 to 1972, Jacqueline Mesmaeker has subsequently focussed on the study of visual problems, analysing visual and textual questions with gentle humour through drawing , installation and video, and making use of archive photographs, films, postcards and scraps of text or objects she has collected over time.

“Agency” is an international Brussels-based initiative that was founded in 1992 by Kobe Matthys. Agency constitutes a growing list of “boundary things” that are mostly derived from recent and historical controversies and juridical cases involving intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trade marks, etc…) from various territories of world integrated capitalism.

The BelgianArtPrize is a prestigious Award for Contemporary Art in Belgium. Organised since 1950 by La Jeune Peinture Belge/De Jonge Belgische Schilderkunst in close collaboration with the Centre for Fine Arts, it aims at supporting Belgian and international artists residing in Belgium for at least a year and strengthen their national and international recognition.

Every two years, shortlisted artists are given the opportunity to realize a new artistic project that is exhibited at BOZAR. The winner is awarded the Crowet Prize (€ 25,000). The winner of the Public Choice receives € 10,000, offered by ING, the Prize’s structural partner.

Jury members are Olga Dreesmann Ramos-Esteban, Wilfried Coorema, Otobong Nkanga (winner BelgianArtPrize 2017), Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Dries Douibi and Nicolaus Schafhausen.