EKP Excellence in Research Award 2021

During the Live Alone Die Together Graduation Show 2021, the EKP Excellence in Research Award 2021 nominees were selected from the graduating class of the Master of Art in Fine Arts and Design by external examiners Angelique Spaninks, Dr. Michelle Kazprzak, David Haines, and Dr. Janice McNab. 

The work of the nominees will be exhibited in the Dutch Design Week along with Wacom Talent Development Award winner Femke Koppe's work from the 16th to 24th of October in Eindhoven; the biggest design event in Northen Europe with more than 2600 participating designers and 350,000 visitors. 

The Nominees 

Robert Lombarts

Through the performative misuse of everyday objects, Robert Lombarts elicits symbioses in which material, image and location tend to swap places. He creates systems in which medium and signifier mingle into each other. This can cause the medium to transform from a platform into a container without losing its actual shape or function. 

View their work here. 

 

Yannan Pan

Through her ever evolving and experimental practice that seamlessly combines photography, film, performance, and installation, Yannan Pan attempts to study how art can reshape the experience of loneliness through the strategies of absurdity. Working with absurdist strategies, she aims to visualize and share her own experience of seclusion. It is her hope that these artworks ultimately resonate with viewers and liberate them from the confines of their self-alienation. Loneliness is ubiquitous and she believes that strategies of absurdity can help people to accept, cope, and coexist with it in an unexpectedly positive way. 

View their work here. 

 

Ananya Panda 

Self-sufficient Nodes is an examination of the human labor that feeds into machine ‘intelligence’ in the form of the ghost-work of metadata tagging, data set curation, content moderation etc. The artwork moves between compliance with, and critique of a system that renders the bodies, senses, and cognition of diverse workers into computational resources. The re-enactment of digitally mediated wage labor relations on crowd-sourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk is used as a strategy to think through this technology. 

View their work here. 

 

Ye Xu 

Through personal experience-based way of narration, Ye Xu tries to share a methodology of how we can objectify, problematize, and situate ourselves within the Nature shared by other (human/non-human, living/non-living) beings, observe our pluralistic and intense connections with the surroundings, and reflect on what we are as human beings. 

View their work here. 

 

 

 

About the EKP Excellence in Research Award 

The EKP Excellence in Research Award is an annual award of € 2,500 for the best graduate research at master level, sponsored by SDK Vastgoed. The award acknowledges students’ creative ability to progress novel ideas into stimulating works and accentuates the transformative potential of artists and designers in the world.