Winner of the 2016 Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Artist Award
Khaled Jarrar
The Sussmann Foundation awards Khaled Jarrar the International Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Award for 2016
When advisory committee chose Khaled Jarrar as the recipient of the 2016 Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Award, we, the board of the foundation were very happy. We believe that Khaled Jarrar’s art work and artistic practice integrates the objectives of the foundation and ideas that the prize stands for. With photographs, videos, installations, films, and performances – but most important with original creative ideas – Khaled Jarrar communicates complex and often disputed realities in both a straight-forward, bold, and sometimes controversial manner, but without losing the sight of the convoluted reality.
Using creative artistic strategies, as well as humor, Khaled Jarrar’s body of works produce a nonviolent resistance to the powers of control. Focusing on his native Palestine he explores the impact of modern-day power struggles on ordinary citizens – the military occupation of his homeland Palestine – but also systems of control within the Palestinian society who is under occupation, militarized societies, including the gendered spaces of violence and the links between economic and state powers that fuel and profit from war or political conflict.
Khaled Jarrar, choose to fight power and systems of oppression through his art, “My camera was my way of resistance,” says Jarrar. We are honored to present the 2016 Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Award to this very deserving artist.
Friedemann Derschmidt, Ronen Eidelman, and Daniela Zobel