The Jury of the 54th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia comprised of Hassan Khan (President, Egypt), Carol Yinghua Lu (China), Letizia Ragaglia (Italy), Christine Macel (France) and John Waters (USA) has decided to confer the awards as follows:

Golden Lion for best National Participation to the German Pavilion.

Christoph Schlingensief has developed a multi-disciplinary practice that is intense, committed, and possesses a strong personal vision. The jury would also like to praise the curatorial work of Susanne Gaensheimer.

Golden Lion for the best artist at the ILLUMInations Exhibition to Christian Marclay

For his widely acclaimed work The Clock, Marclay has over the past 30 years made the boundaries between artistic forms and genres irrelevant. The Clock is definitely a masterpiece.

Silver Lion for a promising young artist at the ILLUMInations Exhibition to Haroon Mirza

For the way his work immediately engages the viewer with its refreshing use of weakness and power.

The Jury has also decided to assign two Special Mentions:

A Special Mention goes to the Lithuanian Pavilion for its conceptually elegant, and productively ambiguous framing of a nation’s art history. Another Special Mention is for Klara Lidén, a confirmation of the strength of her work, its wit and rage, as well as its ability to bring the logic of public intervention into the museum space.

The Board of La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, also awarded Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement under director Bice Curiger 's proposal to:

Sturtevant

Born 1930 in Lakewood, Ohio, USA, lives and works in Paris. Her artistic career is unique and fascinating in developing an extremely coherent oeuvre literally in the "shadow" of the most important artistic experiments and movements of the twentieth century. Her works are raising questions about originality and authorship long before these topics have become intensely discussed in philosophy and literary theory.

Franz West

Born in Vienna in 1947, where he is currently based. He is one of the most important contemporary artists working in sculpture, but also in collage and installation. His earliest works were created around the idea of "Passstϋcke" (or "Adaptives"), small sculptures to be held by a person near the body to become "complete". The interpretations of these sculptures were seen in between "neurosis"and "prostheses". At the same time his works took up an aesthetic language aiming towards the vague and the decrepit, relating to discourses around the body, to psychoanalysis, literature and philosophy in an often grotesque and"messy" way.

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