The recipient of this year’s Bonn Art Award, Louisa Clement, has long achieved international success, extending far beyond the city limits of Bonn, her birthplace and chosen home. Initially recognized for her highly topical photographic works, Clement has continuously broadened her artistic spectrum. Her oeuvre encompasses sculptural objects, robotic clones with autonomous existence, and capsules containing the artist’s synthetic DNA. Throughout her artistic journey, Louisa Clement has consistently explored the intersection of human presence within the artificial and the artificial within the human.
For her exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, the artist has crafted two captivating yet unsettling video works: “Off-Target Effect” and “Believers” (both 2023). While the former reflects on the prospects and perils of molecular biological gene-editing techniques, the latter presents AI-generated individuals delivering eerily compelling AI-generated sermons. Both works delve into the question: Where do the boundaries between artificiality and humanity lie, and how can we discern them?

Louisa Clement (born in 1987 in Bonn) has exhibited in numerous institutions and museums worldwide. From 2010 to 2015, she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as a master student under Andreas Gursky. The artist currently resides and works in Bonn.

Since 2019 the Bonn Art Award, which is awarded every two years, is additionally supported, by a working stipend in a foreign country and by an acquisition from the exhibition, thanks to the generosity of the Bonn couple Dr. Stephanie and Wolfgang Bohn. The research trip attached to the stipend led Louisa Clement to Paris.