The Audience Award 2023

Annette Nielsen's practice
For good reasons, we cannot know exactly what motivated the audience to vote as they did, but we can refer to what Annette Nielsen herself has said about her own work;

My overall art practice is based on migration, adoption and identity seen in a decolonial contemporary. I work i.a. with a reclaiming process of lost identity and culture that also opens up the question of what identity is across borders. Through my works I investigate and comment on the complexity of transnational/transracial adoption from a personal, collective, existential and aesthetic level, where the diasporic body is often included.
The works, 2 x Banana I, II, oil on canvas (2022) are a reference partly to the art collective UFOlab 2004 and Sarah Lucas' Eating a Banana 1990. The banana as an allegory for the Asian adoptee to the West (white inside and yellow outside) becomes intertwined with the criticism of the objectification and hypersexualization of the Asian woman. I also experiment with painting technique with blurring, abstraction and simplification of the motif.
The video, "Whitewash", (2022) comments on a lost identity and the perhaps eternal search for it. The title also refers to the ongoing investigation into systemic falsification of identity papers and child trafficking under the guise of the phenomenon of transnational and transracial adoption.

Annette Nielsen
Lives and works in Aarhus
Free Artschool Helsinki, Aarhus Art Academy.
@1anniecho