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text by Roos Gortzak at the presentation of the Cobra Art Prize Amstelveen 12_11_2024
Dear Sylvie and Hewald,
Dear attendees at this presentation of the Cobra Art Prize 2024,
It is my honor to say a few words on behalf of the jury members Sjarel Ex, Melchior Jaspers and myself, who unanimously chose to award the Cobra Art Prize 2024 to Sylvie Zijlmans and Hewald To reach out to youngsters .
When I entered the revolving door at the entrance of the Cobra Museum this morning, a banana was already turning with it. From the inside to the outside and back in again. I took another good look. Had this banana ended up here by accident, or had someone put it here? I could laugh about it, and especially in the context of your work, Syvlie and Hewald , in which the dividing line between coincidence and staging, between something that simply happens in everyday life and something that is deliberately staged, is often actively sought out in a playful way. Perhaps the banana is still turning there, on the border between inside and outside.
And that inside and outside is what your work is about on different levels. Not only literally, but also figuratively: who is allowed to participate, who is excluded? To a certain extent, we, the three jury members, also discussed this during the meetings that led to you as the winner. Who deserves the Cobra Art Prize now, in 2024? And who is at the table to decide that? We discussed the developments within international contemporary art with each other to see which qualities of the Cobra group we wanted to highlight this time. The interdisciplinary, collective and playful were the qualities that we took into account when assessing the Cobra Art Prize 2024. But back to the inside and outside in your work.
Take the two video recordings that can be seen in the exhibition here. ‘Look In Look Out Inside’ and ‘Look In Look Out Outside ‘ show a performance from different perspectives, first from the inside and then from the outside. You asked the residents of a beautiful building in Amsterdam to participate in a script that you had devised, which included making sounds, playing music, singing and repeatedly emptying a bucket of water out of the window. As an outsider watching this performance afterwards, you don’t know exactly what the instructions were, but you do try to unravel them. What is particularly striking is the pleasure and dedication with which everyone participates in carrying out the instructions. And the hope that this joint creation gives, sorely needed in a society in which polarization is increasing. That feeling of hope, of optimism, arises not only among the participants and spectators who were there at the time, but also among us, the viewers, afterwards.
Or take the film ‘ They Live in Us ‘, which you are also showing here and made in collaboration with the hospital staff and patients of Kings County Hospital . Bernke Klein Zandvoort ends her beautiful text about this work with:
Jongenelis ’ choice to separate the texts from the people and the personal, and to repeatedly pass them on to different narrators, ensures that the sentences float through the spaces, as it were, without a real owner. That gives the texts something distant, which is precisely what makes the sentences appropriated by the viewer. How often were you wrongly afraid that someone was following you? How often did you allow the thought that you no longer recognized your own face? Wondered whether all your thoughts were yours?
Most people will spend their entire lives outside the hospital walls. Others look out from within those walls. How porous are the boundaries that create this division?”
The jury is very impressed by the ways in which you succeed with your art in increasing empathy for others, in bringing people together, in making voices heard that might otherwise go unheard, in providing platforms to experience what you share with each other instead of how you differ from each other. Your work gives hope, confidence that together you can move mountains (to ‘ When Faith Moves Mountains ‘, a work by Francis Alÿs , in which many people together managed to move a mountain of sand just a tiny bit). And although such actions may seem pointless, the opposite is true.
It is precisely that utterly alienating meaninglessness of what is happening that makes it so beautiful. A metaphor for how people can be guided to create something together. In an astonishing change of perspective.
© Roos Gortzak 2024
Roos Gortzak at the entrance of the Museum Cobra Amstelveen