Black rocks, zombies and the suggestion of a rack among contenders Prix de Rome

Ten years ago he still identified with the snake: a scaly reptile that is smart, always keeps a cool head, changes its skin like a new coat, and goes everywhere. For the Dutch artist, writer and poet Michael Tedja (1971), the snake was the ideal metaphor for his artistic practice. At a colossal retrospective at the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen in 2013, Tedja showed what he had to offer: paintings, installations, art criticism, poetry and experimental novels (for which he received the Sybren Polet Prize for experimental literature in 2021). He produced series of hundreds of works that were all related to each other. The result: crazy excess, presented by an artist who never stopped working and did not always choose strictly.

Now, a decade later, Tedja has shed his snake character and is one of the best nominees for the Prix de Rome, the oldest art prize in the Netherlands. The Prix de Rome was established in 1808 and promises a sum of 40,000 euros to the winner plus a residence of your choice. Tedja is one of the 321 international artists living in the Netherlands who have been nominated for this biennial prize. The nominees receive a sum of money to create a new work in five months.

Tedja’s work in the main hall of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, overwhelming and moving. These emotions are caused by (again) the size of the presentation, but especially by the careful selection and content of the work. That content is cruel, exuberant and mysterious.

Michael Tedja,How to Study the Sea Poetically, 2023. Paper, cardboard, acrylic paint.

Tedja exhibits two assemblages consisting of several works. How to Study the Sea Poetically (2023) consists of sixty brightly colored, abstract paintings, between which a poem is woven that must be read in a horizontal wave movement. The lines of poetry are reminiscent of the snake of that time. ‘Changes can be applied/ only when you leave yourself/ you can enter as new’. And that is what Tedja does: the meter-long narrative of the poem combines beautifully with the abstract paintings.

In Vertical Reality (2023), his second contribution, is the starting point of engagement. The work consists of figurative collages, wooden slats, paintings, a video, and an installation with ebony statues that resemble racks used by slave owners. Below and next to these statues are tables with meters of large, inky black books. They contain works on paper, says Tedja, but the books remain closed. As a viewer you can guess.

Ghita Skali, Relentless Putridity, 2023.

Two younger artists

In addition to Tedja, two younger artists have been nominated. Ghita Skali (1992) has delved into the history of the Prix de Rome for her contribution and, like Alexis Blake, the previous winner of the Prix de Rome, criticizes the system of competition in art. Until the early twentieth century, Skali discovered, nominated artists had to work on their submission behind closed doors. They were given food and water through a hatch in the door.

Skali has depicted this history in a half-open door with a shutter and a stone wall behind it. No matter how many doors you open, the artist implies, you always run into a wall. Relentless Putridity (2023) is a precious, but also somewhat navel-gazing installation. And not unimportant: why would you submit if you are against the competition system?

Josefin Arnell, Community Center 2 – A fantastical horror community production!, 2023. Video, color, 5.1 sound, 16 min.

Zombie movie

The third nominee is Josefin Arnell (1984), who presents a funny, committed zombie film with a somewhat unsteady camera. In Community Center 2 – A fantastical horror community production! (2023), Arnell seduced the network of the De Witte Boei community center in the Wittenburg district of Amsterdam to collaborate on a horror-comedy that loosely criticizes the gentrification of Amsterdam.

The star roles are reserved for zombie Sabine Beilfuss, who likes to sink her sharp teeth into female flesh, and for the moving, liquid-bubbling meatballs during the neighborhood lunch. The fifteen-minute film contains many nods to the zombie genre and is especially promising.

Volcanic island

The fourth nominee is Jonas Staal (1981), who, like Tedja, is a relatively veteran in the visual arts. It is thanks to the lifting of the age limit of forty that Staal and Tedja were able to submit this edition. And what luck, because Staal also deserves the prize this year.

Steel Empire’s Island (2023), just like Tedja’s work, is impressive, conceptually perfectly thought out, beautiful to see and committed. Staal has unearthed a wealth of archival material in libraries and museums surrounding four centuries of exploitation of the volcanic island of Ascension in the Atlantic Ocean.

Jonas Staal,Empire’s Island, 2023. Video, sound, color, 20 min, 34 sec.

Using a model, a twenty-minute video and a diary of the first resident of Ascension – an eighteenth-century Dutch sailor exiled for sodomy – Staal depicts how the black rocks of Ascension became the breeding ground for the future fantasies of Western rulers.

Whether it was Charles Darwin, who wanted to turn the island into a green paradise in the nineteenth century and thus displaced native plants, the British and Americans who turned the island into an American military base during the Second World War, or as now, the immensely wealthy Americans filling the island with planetary research stations.

Staal shows that Ascension, like so many places on Earth, has been regarded by Westerners as a ‘terra nullius’. You could do whatever you wanted with it, you could dream away any reality, any history, by force if necessary. The great thing about Staal’s presentation is that the artist no longer relies on the future fantasies that Westerners project on the island. Not what do we want with those rocks, but what does the island itself want?