Jury Member 2023: Marloes de Vries

Marloes de Vries is the director of Roodkapje in Rotterdam.

Jury Report

In her space, Niekeline has broken open the floor, opened the windows, invited ants, uprooted a birch tree from the courtyard sold to big capital, and installed four motors. Hanging in a net stretched between these four motors, you can view everything from above and see how the outside world penetrates the interior. She raises the question, where does one thing end, and another begin?

First of all I would like to congratulate and thank all the artists who graduated this year for taking the time yesterday to tell me about the work, their motives and plans for the future. It was a pleasure to meet you.

While storm Poly raged past the windows yesterday, I was taken to other worlds and spaces, in a physical sense, digitally and through my nose. I have regularly asked you the question where am I?
It is understandable that, given the crises in our living environment, this new generation of artists is looking for an escape from climate depression, housing shortages, polarization and old white men. I have therefore seen glimpses into alternate universes, received absurdist answers and saw that some of you want to freeze time in order to be able to hold loved ones who disappear for a while.

The artist I have chosen shows that between apparent extremes there is a grey-area worth exploring. Stripped of gravity for a moment, Niekeline der Kinderen didn't have to mince words to let me experience this grey-area, and that is the power of art as far as I'm concerned.
In her space, Niekeline has, among other things, broken up the floor, opened the windows, invited ants, pulled a birch tree from the inner garden that had been sold to the big business and installed four motors. Hanging in a net stretched between these four engines, you can take a closer look at everything from above and see how the outside world invades the interior. She therefore asks the question, where does one end and the other begin? If I eat a cherry, when does the pulp become part of my body and my poop in the sewer is an extension of me? Seeing the circle of life as an ecosystem in which we inextricably participate, not superior, not inferior but somewhere in between.

The work is experienced and stubborn, Niekeline clearly knows what she is doing and does not wait for permission. This disobedient attitude fits in perfectly with the tradition of Mique Eggermont and makes me incredibly curious about the work she will make next. I therefore hope that this prize and thus support for your practice will enable you to take the next steps. And for the visitors, let Niekeline lift you up, it's a pleasant state of being, in between.

Jury Member 2022: Willem Oorebeek

Dutch artist Willem Oorebeek (1953) studied at the Academy of Art in Rotterdam, was a lecturer at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, and at the Hochschule der Künste in Hamburg. His conceptual works, installations, and book projects have been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions.

Jury Report

First of all, I would like to express my gratitude for the honorable invitation to be on the jury of the Mique Eggermont Prize. I highly rate this as an initiative to add a personal touch to the machinery of the institutional business. At this stage, a small push of support can have a lot of effect and that's why it has not been easy for me to choose to whom to give such an impulse.

In the end, the choice fell on the candidate who, in my opinion, is the least spectacular, yet the most articulate and also makes the most settled work; I'm talking about Caroline Sarneel.

I call her photographic works settled, which, due to the choice of material, create a veil of absence and lend the chosen objects in the landscape a subcutaneous, contemplative atmosphere.

The most articulate I call the relationship between the photographic work and the paintings, which has an exactness of explicitly because they are NOT the same, yet do reveal a connection through precisely their difference(s) as if seen through colored lenses. The least spectacular are the paintings that at first glance seem to provide little access, but on closer inspection - through Caroline’s conception of her own smallness in the tangible cosmos in which she exists - offer a shared understanding towards the viewer.

Perhaps not a very striking word, but one that does express from which she speaks is the word SOLVENCY. By that, she means certainly not anti-social, because she seems to me to be the most social of the class, but the word loneliness can be understood more as the position of the forester, who shares his attention with all the trees of the forest and yet is still able to see the forest.

I'll leave it at this, and wish Caroline this moment of recognition, but also everyone I got to speak to yesterday good luck in their further career.

Jury Member 2021: Maaike Gouwenberg

Maaike Gouwenberg is a curator and initiator working from Europe and the US. Based on her experience with exceptional projects on the cusp of theater, visual arts, and film, she works alongside artists to venture together into unknown terrain.


She founded several art(ists) organizations, including the multidisciplinary exhibition space Expodium in Utrecht; A.P.E., which focuses on the development of performances, exhibitions, printed matter, and meetings that cannot be realized within traditional institutional frameworks (with Keren Cytter and Kathy Noble); and the residency program Deltaworkers in New Orleans (with Joris Lindhout).

Gouwenberg worked as curator at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (2007–2011), and produced major projects with Alexandre Singh, Michael Portnoy and Rana Hamadeh at (then) Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. She has been a programmer for IFFR since 2012, and a producer at large for Performa, New York, since 2017. She is co-curator of Melanie Bonajo’s presentation for the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022.

Jury Report

Thinking about all the works and conversations and who wants to go where and what the future might bring I cracked my brain. What did I remember, which image remained, which image did I have to look at again, scratch over, reposition, hold upside down or rewind? Step by step, through weaving opinions, coloring matter, absorbing vibrations of an atmosphere and letting memories run, I came to my choice.

The artist I chose made an important choice during the lockdown, realizing that she no longer wanted the multitude of materials she had collected day in and day out in the field, and that she wanted to interact with the voice of the audience. could use in the way she had suggested.

Rather than persistently persisting or halting the project altogether, she managed to seize this moment of change and make it the core of the work she eventually displays in AS A MATTER OF FACT. The memory that had become the earlier research became the starting point of a work that attempts to physically display memory (a moment about the past but experienced in the present). Goya van der Heijden's exceptional installation, in which sound-carrying material from the past is deployed in a way that is punk and contemporary, has convinced me to believe in the future of her practice.

She embraces the seductive beauty of the sound tape, while at the same time she does not shy away from cutting the tape raw and even cutting the cover of the cassette tape in half. This combination of the love for memory and the reality of the moment is reflected in the apparently loose presentation. I see the freedom that you seem to be taking as a positive force and I hope you can keep it as a guideline in an artistry that continues to push the boundaries of ideas, media and disciplines.

Jury Member 2021: Kianoosh Motallebi

Kianoosh Motallebi (1982) is a Dutch-Iranian artist working with video, sculpture, animation, 3d modelling and, more recently, text. His recent practice utilises etymology as a point of departure to translate historical biographies and events into spatial experiences, in which the historical, individual and fictional converge. To this effect he is researching the potential of virtual reality and volumetric video.

Motallebi is alumnus of the Rijksakademie and a Lorentz Centre Fellow. He has taken part in residences such as Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (USA), Very Real Time (Cape Town) and Juming Museum (Taipei). Exhibitions and screenings include, Sharjah Art Foundation (Sharjah), Slyzmud (Buenos Aires), STUK center for contemporary Art (Leuven), De Hallen (Haarlem), Honghah Museum (Taiwan). He has served as committee member for the Mondriaan Foundation and is currently an advisor for the Netherlands Funds for Creative industries.

He has recently hurt his right arm and is weary of collectives.

Jury Report

The exchange between the body and its environment seems to be an important motif in the exhibition of the 2020 alumni (which takes place in 2021 because of COVID). Within this thematic, I found Christy Westhovens' technological approach to be distinctive, due to her research into physical interaction and the web of macrostructures that comes with the context of observation technology.

I had seen her microphone at the entrance to the exhibition but had not yet understood this as part of a work, and instead talked to her about her other work on the first floor. The interactive installation of Westhovens can convert physical electrical capacity into sound via sensors that the viewer must hold. The experience of architecture is thus expanded by employing the invisible qualities of the human body as a transformative resource. This results in a transformative experience of space in which touch, movement and sound interconnect.

The work I initially missed consists of Viewsonic computer screens with some generic texts: ‘Hello, hey, the weather...', etc. They are the words and speculations of the viewers near to the microphone, who's input is interpreted by an AI, which then tries to display it ‘correctly’. This is a minimal intervention in a sea of ​​AI projects that often have spectacular concepts behind them. Where the promises are often not fulfilled and notions of dangerous AI are only repeated, Westhovens manages to emphasize the human component in AI with this work: as an entity that is mainly subject to ‘Nurture' instead of ‘Nature', because it attempts to represent what is available or what it is presented with.

Westhovens is aware and critical of the presentation of her work and analyzes the steps she takes. This is also reflected in this presentation. Her step to experiment with interaction between two incarnations of the work—one in Rotterdam, one in Maastricht—demonstrates her awareness of the possibilities of AI and is a relevant step in researching the circumstances surrounding the emergence of AI recognition technology. Based on the potential of the work and her presentation, I choose Christy Westhovens from the 2020 class as the winner of the ME Award, and I hope this prize will enable her to do more research and experiment.

Read an interview with Laura about her graduation work here (Dutch only).