Outer Space Transmitter, 2021
Atmosphere ≠ Totality, 2023
Spitting off the Edge of the World, 2023

As in 2021, the prizewinner will receive the entire upper floor of the Kunsthalle as a venue for her solo presentation.

For the jury, Mona Schulzek's work exemplifies what a sculptural practice in the categories of plastic, sculpture and installation can achieve today: to provide contemporary impulses for what we try to understand as space. Her works touch on discourses immanent to the art system, but reaches beyond this into various areas of life. In her installations, she makes use of various media and disciplines, such as photography and the natural sciences. An example of this can be seen in her Outer Space Transmitter since 2021. In it, Schulzek works with a space surrounding us that both actually exists and addresses the imaginary: outer space. Her art is all-encompassing, from the construction of a transmitter as a sculptural object, to the development of an "extraterrestrial alphabet", to obtaining a certified radio license. She is thus remarkably consistent in her sculptural and conceptual practice, the jury continued.

Mona Schulzek completed her studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 2023 as a master student of Gregor Schneider. She received an award for her Outer Space Transmitter in 2022 and was awarded the Max Ernst Scholarship in 2019. Her works are represented in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bochum and the Max Ernst Museum Brühl. She has already had solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including France, Austria and Spain.

The Outer Space Transmitter was previously a functioning radio station with the help of which Mona Schulzek sends art into space and attempts to make contact with extraterrestrials. To this end, she trained for two years as a radio operator, built a parabolic antenna and developed an extraterrestrial alphabet. In Recklinghausen, she is showing the transmitter without the radio technology, as an "image" of the object itself, directed towards the window opening. The artist sees art as a cosmic language that can be understood by extraterrestrials. Schulzek also understands every intelligent life form as a creative life form and grants them the ability to reflect and abstract. For her, the language of art therefore represents the central key to communication with extraterrestrials.

The dioramas Atmosphere ≠ Totality show volcanic rocks and meteorites that the artist collected during a stay in Iceland and bought in planetariums. For Schulzek, meteorites and volcanic rocks represent entropic material. Entropy describes the process of decay that brings all matter into a state of disorder.
 
The most all-encompassing is the installation Spitting off the Edge of the World. With a frequency of 16 hearts, organ pipes permanently emit waves into the room. A long-wave frequency that the human ear can just about hear, but which is primarily perceived through the resonance and vibration of one's own body. The sound covers the room like a blanket, hits the walls like waves, is thrown back and around and condenses in the corners of the floor. Known in organ music as the humble tone, Mona Schulzek poses visual and acoustic questions here in the spirit of the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's "Space Odyssey 2001", which revolve around the great connections between people, the world and the universe.