Beckers Art Award 2022 goes to Laleh Kazemi Veisari

The 35th Beckers Art Award - a grant of 200 000 SEK - will be awarded Laleh Kazemi Veisari who was born in 1983 and works in Stockholm. In 2019, she graduated from Konstfack in Stockholm.

Jury’s statement:

Laleh Kazemi Veisari talks about how she collects bits of information and fragments of knowledge, which she pieces together to get a better understanding of our world. In accordance with this endeavour, she deconstructs images, which are divided and broken down to the component level, with the aim of discovering what’s hidden in the whole. She uses drawing as a method for reflecting on selected issues, for further deconstruction, and as a way of communicating both with herself and her surroundings.

With a background in Sweden, Iran and Finland, she weaves together traces of impressions and fragments of knowledge. It’s traces of geopolitical upheavals and reflections of water that metaphorically connect the continents. With broad language skills, she immerses herself into cultures and ways of expression, and finds there traces of shards that she picks up to continue the collection of what constitutes the growing foundation for her entire artistry.

When exploring alternative possibilities, she likes to work in series, with a repetition that forms a return and rhythm in images and sculptures. She seeks a diversity that she herself calls epistemic pluralism. This is, again, a way to flush out pieces of knowledge that are hidden inside the whole or in details. She tries different perspectives: to look closely or from a distance, to want to interpret and insert both the abstract and the concrete.

Laleh Kazemi Veisari has been awarded the 2022 Beckers Art Award because, in her ambitious quest to understand the world, she succeeds in creating a varied visual expression, which conveys new perspectives on the world. She creates art that in its poetically austere expression constantly shifts focus between the small concrete details and the incomprehensible diversity of the world. By deconstructing vast quantities of information, which are joined together in drawing, sculpture, painting, and text, she creates a presence where we’re included as co-creators and discoverers.

/ Magnus Jensner on behalf of the jury

Laleh Kazemi Veisari was born in 1983 and works in Stockholm. Her work is interdisciplinary, engages collaborative processes and explores the imaginary, both socially and spatially, through expressions such as painting, drawing, sculpture and writing.

In 2019, Laleh Kazemi Veisari received her MA in Free Art from Konstfack (University of Arts, Crafts and Design) with the exhibition Letters from Water. She also has an MA in interdisciplinary studies from the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg and a BA in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

On top of that, Laleh Kazemi Veisari has been awarded the 2019 Bernadotte Scholarship for her project The relationship between drawing and painting through Walter Benjamin’s historical philosophical theses (Über den Begriff der Geschichte). In connection with her receiving the Bror Hjorth scholarship for young cartoonists in 2018, her first solo exhibition Porous Red Dust premiered in Uppsala.

Earlier this year, Laleh Kazemi Veisari presented an exhibition titled Yrsel at Göteborgs Konsthall, and during the autumn there will be a piece in the upcoming issue of Ord&Bild and an exhibition at Belenius.