The artist Nico Joana Weber (*1983), who was born and grew up in Bonn and now lives in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, is the winner of the BONN ART AWARD 2019. By means of
different artistic media Weber discusses how architecture and landscape are influenced by aesthetics and politics within transcultural contexts.

At the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Weber presents her new work Tropic Telecom, which was created during a work scholarship in Paris. The video installation’s protagonist is an albino alligator, which takes the visitors on a journey to places with a French colonial and migration history as well as housing complexes, which have been built at the outskirts of Paris since the 1970s. The 3D animation of the alligator was developed in cooperation with the DNEG Greenlight Trainee Programme, London. The video has been integrated into a specially developed spatial installation, for which Weber has created precise sculptural compositions. The materials and forms used take up motifs of Art Deco architecture in the spirit of Exoticism as well as elements of both colonial architecture and brutalist buildings. The result is a conceptually dense and at the same time airily associative structure of references and newly created images, which reflect Paris’s present hybridlike postcolonial reality.

Since its revision in 2009, the BONN ART AWARD, which is awarded every two years, has been linked to a three- to six-month work scholarship in a European metropolis of the winner’s choice. Since 2019, the award has been supported by Dr. Stephanie and Wolfgang Bohn with a sum of 10,000 euros. In addition, the Bohns donate further 5,000 euros to allow the Kunstmuseum Bonn to purchase an artwork from ach exhibition of the BONN ART AWARD for its collection.