Playground Art Prize 2023

Lotti Brockmann is a 7th semester student, first at the Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle and currently at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Veronika Dirnhofer, working both artistically and curatorially. Her artistic interest starts with contemporary social issues and moves between drawing, performative and research practice. In her artistic practice, she deals with themes around power structures, historiographies and collective practices.

Public space plays an important role in her artistic practice; here she sees the potential to bring people from different fields together and create dialogues. She uses the power relations and associated spatial order of public space as a starting point and source of inspiration for her works.

One material that is often used is sugar, which fascinates Lotti Brockmann because of its cultural history, its symbolism and its material properties. In her artistic work, the artist is interested in exploring the connection between themes such as nationalism, sexism and colonialism, which are inscribed in sugar, and in turn to understand them better.

The PLAYGROUND ART PRIZE 2023 goes to Lotti Brockmann for her work "Stolen Statues (Licked)".  This is an ongoing collection of impressions of the mouth-nose area of public (male) sculptures in Vienna's urban space. She describes this act herself as an emancipatory one in which she acts in a grey zone that raises the question of copyright of the public sculptures and at the same time the question of the participation of public places of memory.  She appropriates something very intimate and at the same time public. From these collected prints, she creates lollipops in original size that depict the respective mouth-nose area of famous people (such as Freud, Schrödinger, Columbus, Goethe, Schiller) in Vienna's urban space. These lollipops can then be enjoyed in the exhibition. She sees helping herself to the mouths of heroic male figures from history, kissing them, licking them, as a humorous form of empowerment. Not only through licking, but also through the material's own agency, the shape of the lollipops changes. Through the melting and the licking, the shape is altered, its characteristic features lost beyond recognition.

Sopo Kashakashvili, born 1994, is a Georgian artist. She moved to Germany in 2014 and is in her 9th semester studying art at the Städel with Judith Hopf. She works in various forms of artistic media, including video, installations, performances, sound, object and text assemblages. Her work questions social coexistence, forms of alternative lifestyles, the detachment of a body from its origins, gender roles, emotional/mental states and their social construction as a whole. Overall, Sopo's work reflects the gap between factual and fictional realities from a sociological and cultural perspective. Since 2020, Sopo Kashakashvili has been co-founder of the artist and architect collective commune6x3, which was invited to Documenta 15.

In the exhibition, Sopo Kashakashvili is represented with three works. One of them is the work "Offenbacher Abendblatt" The artist lived in the building. When the landlord started to raise the prices of the flats and, with the help of a lawyer, slowly evicted the neighbours, Sopo produced a fictional magazine, the Offenbacher Abendblatt' with lived stories, photos, memories and letters from a lawyer transformed through the APP called Dada Poetry Generator - as a way to reflect and play with German bureaucratic language. The eagle collaged from archived newspapers of the Abendblatt, both a symbol for the city of Frankfurt and for football teams, illustrate the dychotomy and the connection between word and image.

"The Host" is a multi-sensory installation that explores the experience of pregnancy and birth. Inspired by her own pregnancy and theorised through the Greco-Roman belief that the octopus resembles the womb, the work reflects on her experience and draws attention to the ideas of gathering, harbouring and the general idea of origin.
The colour red, which dominates this installation, represents the interior. Sopo Kashakashvili wants to sensitise the viewer to their own body. Overall, this multi-sensory installation reflects on what our bodies house and how we are housed in different spaces as time passes, conversations end and begin, people come and go.