Evens Arts Prize awarded to Marlene Monteiro Freitas and Andrea Büttner

Evens Arts Prize awarded to Marlene Monteiro Freitas and Andrea Büttner

We are pleased to announce that choreographer and dancer Marlene Monteiro Freitas has been selected as the recipient of the 2021 Evens Arts Prize, with a Special Mention awarded to visual artist Andrea Büttner.

Find out more about the Evens Arts Prize 2021

The Evens Arts Prize jury selected Freitas (Cape Verde, 1979) in recognition of “the singular and compelling force of the choreographic worlds” she creates. “Daring and experimental, their sensorial immediacy draws discrete audiences into contact with a dazzling interplay of bodies, energies and affects.” They particularly praised the Lisbon-based artist’s rich and layered scrutiny of European cultural traditions and their legacies. Often merging genres, myths and allegories, her works deftly undermine implicit power structures, reimagining traditions not as fixed absolutes, but as fluid encounters between subjectivities.

The jury also awarded a Special Mention to Andrea Büttner (Stuttgart, 1972), recognising the Berlin-based artist’s “rich, multifaceted work, which composes and dismantles relationships between cultural registers, philosophical and aesthetic traditions of Western modernity, and European histories of fascism and exploitation.” The jury particularly noted Büttner’s ability to uncover the transformative potentials of collaborative processes, illuminating otherwise shrouded forms of resistance, togetherness and community.

Both Freitas and Büttner’s work will be celebrated through a series of events during 2022, including an honours ceremony as part of the Evens Foundation’s 30th Anniversary event in June at Bozar in Brussels. A series of events focusing on the works of the laureate and Special Mention recipient are planned for 2022.

On 28 March, the Evens Foundation will co-host Luxurious Poverty, a conversation between Andrea Büttner and curator Isabella Lenzi, at Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, on the occasion of the new re-hang of the Collection.More information

Montiero Freitas will premier a new work titled idiota alongside performances of her work Mal - Embriaguez Divina at the Kunstenfestivaldesartes in Brussels from 7 to 12 May, with a special event hosted by the Evens Foundation on 12 May. More details will be shared closer to the date.

Further events will be announced later in the year.