Jury Statement Tabori Prize 2023: Hofmann&Lindholm
With the Tabori Prize 2023, the jury of the Fonds Darstellende Künste honors the artistic duo Hofmann&Lindholm. The collective was selected from all the artists and groups that the Fonds Darstellende Künste has supported over the past five years.
The artists duo Hannah Hofmann and Sven Lindholm have been developing formats on the interface between performative, visual and acoustic art for over 20 years. Whether they are radio plays, video installations, stagings, films, exhibitions, animations, public and private spaces or radio programs: They address highly relevant issues in society that they precisely analyze, dissect and translate into aesthetically very complex experimental arrangements. Together with their audience, they thus explore strategies of self-empowerment, deliver contemporary experimental instructions and create a project that can be experienced by each audience member individually.
The video piece „Vergessene Bühnentexte“ (2001) belongs to their most important works; it is a link of moments of forgetting with “breaking out of roles” on opposing screens. Another is „Serie Deutschland“ (2008), in which Hofmann&Lindholm have the audience reenact photos that have been shaping Germans’ visual memory since after the war.
In 2015, they sent their audience – basically working in shifts – into a badly soundproofed apartment in Stuttgart in order to simulate together the life of the family Weiß, who seemed to live there, for the surroundings. And in 2016, they had their audience completely disappear into wardrobes on an open stage. In Bochum, they are currently founding the Provisorische Gesellschaft, which will be realized as a work in progress. Over the course of a year, the team of directors will devote themselves to a social situation that is viscerally and challengingly shaped by transitions, by processes of dissolution and potential beginnings, by social cocooning, collaborations and change.
These are very different works that are united by one thing: impressive images and individual experiences that stay with audiences for a long time. In the process, they succeeded in establishing a completely new approach to the field of performing arts and shaping a partially documentary format that still doesn’t have a name and perhaps won’t receive one – except for “Hofmann&Lindholm”.
The expert jury of the Fonds Darstellende Künste is awarding the Tabori Prize 2023, endowed with 25,000 euro, to Hofmann&Lindholm.