The Danish Art Foundation has a long tradition of giving national lifetime honour awards to artists who have made a unique contribution to art and culture in Denmark.
Lise Autogena, Professor of Cross-Disciplinary Art at Hallam, was awarded the Lifelong Award for Visual Arts, in recognition of her multimedia installations, film and performances.
Her work makes urgent environmental and climate issues visible and brings together art, technology and science. Her work has explored issues ranging from climate change and complex man-made systems to the consequences of uranium mining for the local population in Greenland.
In their nomination of Lise, Statens Kunstfond, said: “Autogena's works reflects a world undergoing change. Ocean currents stop, wild animals perish, populations are on the run. Nature is out of balance, and it now responds with chaos. Autogena's art is important. She creates it out of necessity, and from this position she establishes a sensuous-aesthetic cognitive space for the individual.
“Through Autogena's work we can understand the powerful forces that cultures and human actions unleash - and that nature stands up against. There are no quick-fix solutions here; just conditions and consequences that point to us as individuals and the need to change our ways as human beings.”
Lise’s installation HavObservatoriet (sea observatory), is a public digital artwork in Vejle, Denmark. The observatory is a circular steel structure, in which the viewer is enveloped by a moving wave on a digital panoramic screen depicting a real-time simulation of ocean waves.
Black Shoals, a data visualisation installation, depicted the global stock markets in the form of a planetarium. It explored the changing relationships between capitalism, nature and technology, and mirror how man-made systems have become living organisms that feed on themselves and eventually collapse.
Her video work, Kuannersuit/Kvanefjeld, highlights the conflicts in the small community of Narsaq in Greenland over the issue of uranium mining. It explores the difficult decisions and trade-offs faced by a culture that seeks to escape its colonial past and define its own identity.
Last year, Lise’s work Foghorn Requiem received a Guinness World Record for the ‘most ship horns in a piece of music’. Foghorn Requiem was a musical piece performed by 75 brass players, a foghorn and an armada of ships to mark the disappearance of the sound of the foghorn from the UK’s coastal landscape.
Roger Bateman, Director of the Creative Industries Institute at Sheffield Hallam University, said: “I am thrilled that Professor Lise Autogena has been recognised with this prestigious lifelong achievement from the Danish Arts Foundation. Lise's pioneering work strikes a balance between data science and the visual arts, reflecting on the biggest climate and environmental issues of our time. This well-deserved award is testament to Lise's remarkable contributions and commitment to the visual arts."
The honours are given to living artists who have provided a unique contribution to Danish society through their art and are awarded across literature, visual arts, performing arts, music, architecture, film and crafts, and design.
