Evens Prizes

The Evens Prizes are a core part of the Foundation’s activities. Awarded biannually, they highlight innovative practices and achievements by individuals and organisations across Europe.

Each Prize honours a different area of practice, covering Education, Journalism, the Arts and Science, and has its own programme structure, reflecting different areas of concern and purpose within each field.

The Prize programmes are continually evolving, helping the Foundation identify new challenges, insights and perspectives and contributing significantly to the Foundation’s ever-expanding transdisciplinary network of innovators.

The new Evens Arts Prize and Evens Journalism Prize programme cycle began in 2021, and judging was able to take palace despite Covid-19, thanks to the flexibility and patience of the judges and the Foundation’s team, who facilitated the calls, nominations and judging.

The Foundation also began making plans to find new ways to celebrate the recipients of its Prizes from 2020 and 2021. Covid-19 prevented the team from organising awards ceremonies or Prize-related events, so team members identified the 30th-anniversary event planned for 2022 as an opportunity to create a special moment of celebration with an honours ceremony for all of the laureates at Bozar in Brussels.

The Evens Arts Prize

The Evens Arts Prize has been honouring artists that engage with contemporary challenges in Europe for more than 20 years. The biennial Prize carries a sum of €15,000 and is judged by an independent jury of leading curators, festival directors and other industry figures. Laureates are selected from a list of internationally acclaimed artists, who are nominated by representatives of 25 major European cultural institutions. Occasionally, the jury may also award a Special Mention distinction, recognising outstanding work and contributions to the European art scene.

The 2021 jury, chaired by Ernest Van Buynder, Honorary Chair, M HKA, consisted of Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Artistic Co-Director of Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; Manuel

Borja-Villel, Director of Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director of the Berlinale, Berlin; Anne Hilde Neset, Director of Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; and Christine Standfest, Dramaturg, Curator, ImPulsTanz, Vienna.

The Evens Arts Prize 2021 was awarded to choreographer and dancer Marlene Monteiro Freitas (1979, Cape Verde) in recognition of “the singular and compelling force of the choreographic worlds” she creates.” The jury 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 (1972, Stuttgart, Germany), 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.