Marcel Odenbach: Es brennt Cat. Kunsthalle Nuremberg

It has only just been reported that Marcel Odenbach (*1953) will be awarded the 2021 Wolfgang Hahn Prize. The small and memorable catalog published on the occasion of the current exhibition at Kunsthalle Nuremberg arrives just at the right time to illustrate the reason behind the choice of this award-winner: for quite a number of years now, the Cologne-based artist has been less interested in his own impact, but rather in his surroundings and his contemporaries. With his drawings, collages, videos, and installations, he ­explores questions of identity in the context of ­sexual orientation, class, and gender. Odenbach forms works that, owing to their experimental form and theoretical background, focus just as much on historical connections between colonialism and globalization as on the power of the normative and of representation. Since the mid-1970s, Marcel Odenbach has developed his pictorial language in montages and cross-fades of film and television recordings, archive material, as well as his own images and film sequences. Alongside the video works, he has always prepared drawings in the planning of video installations, which also work as independent image-text composi­tion.

Hans Dickel (born 1956) studied art history and history in Tübingen and Hamburg (doctorate 1985, habilitation 1996). He was assistant at the Berlin University of the Arts (1988 to 1993), exhibition curator and guest lecturer in Harvard, Kyoto, Minneapolis, and Prague. He represented the chair at the Art History Institute of the FU Berlin (1997 to 2002). Since 2002, he has taught as a professor of modern art history at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. In 2010 he had a research stay at Columbia University New York. Mirjam Zadoff (born 1974) is an Austrian historian and director of the NS Documentation Center Munich. She studied History and Jewish Studies at the University of Vienna. From 2001 to 2002, she was a member of the Historical Commission of the Republic of Austria, which was commissioned by the Austrian government to research the "confiscation of property" during the National Socialist era as well as restitution and compensation measures that have taken place since then. In 2006, she received her doctorate summa cum laude in the subjects of Modern and Contemporary History and Jewish History. Ellen Seifermann (born 1956) studied art history, philosophy, and political science in Freiburg. She is a curator and publishes catalogues on contemporary artists. Before moving to the Kunsthalle Nuremberg as director in 1999, she was exhibition director of the Kunstverein Heilbronn.