LEAP25
The Konschthal has launched the 5th edition of LEAP - The Luxembourg Encouragement for Artists Prize, created in 2016 and awarded every two years to a contemporary artist or group of artists. Four finalists were selected by an international jury from the entries submitted in response to the call for entries in December 2024. A group exhibition of the same name will be held at the Konschthal from 29 March to 27 April 2025. The winner's prize will be awarded at the vernissage on Friday 28 March 2025.
The LEAP Prize is designed to support artists from all disciplines in the visual arts whose talent and vision have recently stood out and who are ready to take their work to the next level. As well as rewarding them for their work, the prize aims to raise the profile of the winning artists and establish them in the contemporary art world over the long term.For the first time, the four shortlisted finalists will benefit from a residency in the run-up to the exhibition: Mike Bourscheid, Rozafa Elshan, Jil Lahr and Lynn Scheidweiler will be hosted at the Bridderhaus for a month before the exhibition at the Konschthal. This residency offers them an environment conducive to creation as well as financial and logistical support to develop their artistic projects in preparation for their exhibition.
Rozafa Elshan
Rozafa Elshan is born in Luxembourg in 1994 of Kosovar origin. Through photography, she explores the relationship between body, space and time, and also uses drawing, sculpture and installation to materialise mobile and changing forms. Her work seeks to inscribe a structure that is constantly being rewritten, experimenting with the boundaries between the body, space and the world. Using a variety of devices arrangements* and rhythms, she questions the manipulation of structures and the bodily experience in an everyday landscape. Her installations, always adapted to the context, provoke an imbalance that encourages movement and a form of freedom by overcoming rigidities and personal certainties. Her work follows a compositional approach in which horizontality is understood as a shared landscape and verticality as a present incision. This juxtaposition opens up a complex field that requires constant experimentation. The body acts as an active entity in continuous interaction with its surroundings. In this process, plastic works emerge in which appearance and disappearance are inseparably intertwined. She traces a line of existence that moves within the tension between the edge and longing. The body becomes the starting point for research that continuously challenges existing orders. Through the combination of various media, a dynamic composition unfolds—one that redefines space and time while breaking established conventions to open up new realms of experience.
Mike Bourscheid
Mike Bourscheid’s sculpture- and performance-based practice, which often involves his fabrication of ungainly appendages and prosthetics, channels alternate, often gender-fluid personae and abject humour as devices for exploring aspects of his own Luxeumbourgian heritage, as well as the absurdities of normative masculine expression and patriarchal power. In Bourscheid’s performances, these “costume-objects” often become actors in their own right, functioning simultaneously as “ritualistic semaphores and as theatrical props.” Much of Bourscheid’s work reveals the actions and accoutrement of these characters to be uncomfortably out of step with their environment. The artist’s process of learning the eccentric suite of skills necessary to produce his work – from patternmaking to baking to glass work – is a fundamental part of his practice, and an important means for him to query and confound stereotypes of masculine and feminine labour (which he observed early on in his own parents’ separation of skills – his mother was a seamstress and his father a welder).
Lynn Scheidweiler
Lynn Scheidweiler is a Luxembourg-based artist whose practice operates at the crossroads of performing and visual arts, with a strong emphasis on social engagement and participatory exploration. Her work is driven by an enduring curiosity about the interplay between space, performance, and audience interaction, creating spaces where art becomes a shared experience.
Central to Scheidweiler’s approach is her use of interviews as a method of research and material collection. By gathering voices, testimonies, and perspectives, she transforms these narratives into sculptural works, paintings, installations, and musical performances. This process fosters a layered exchange of ideas, weaving diverse realities into a shared creative language.
Collaboration is a cornerstone of her artistic practice. As a founding member of the Dunne Jungs Collective since 2017, Scheidweiler has developed participatory installations and performances that emphasize shared creation and audience engagement. The collective’s series, Landscape of Questions + Answers, has been realized in spaces such as Raum für drastische Maßnahmen Berlin, Galerie Ladons Hamburg, Wagenhallen e.V. Stuttgart, Galerie Mitte Bremen, and HuMBase Stuttgart.
Her sculptures and installations often act as dynamic frameworks, activated and completed by the participation of visitors. This approach reflects her belief that art is a living, interactive process that thrives on collaboration and community engagement.
She studied stage and costume design at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre in Brussels. In 2022, she completed the Post-Master Program École Offshore at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts et du Design Nancy.
Scheidweiler’s theatre work has been featured at venues, including Theater Freiburg, Théâtre Royal Flamand (KVS) in Brussels, DOCK 11 Berlin, Rotondes in Luxembourg, Philharmonie Luxembourg, and Grand Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg. This background in theatre enriches her artistic practice, bringing a focus on spatial awareness and performative elements to her visual art.
Jil Lahr
Jil Lahr (*1991, Luxembourg) works and lives in Hamburg. In her artistic practice she works interdisciplinary with various media, such as painting, sculpture and installation. Recurring motifs and objects installations are everyday objects such as naturalia, packaging,vessels, curiosities and souvenirs. Collecting and combing forms the core of her artistic work. Through accumulation, subtraction and sacralization of the supposedly familiar, the eye is sharpened for the extraordinary hidden within. The procedure of assembling, collecting and presenting reflects cultural, social and historical contexts by bringing diverse elements into a dialogical space. Analogous to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne, she uses this practice to develop topographies that explore the resemblances, symbolism, ambiguity and ideological core of objects through seriality by offering viewers a space for worlds of images, associations and narratives. As in the cabinets of curiosities in the early days of museum history, she combine objects and paintings of different origins to create site-specific installations. She does make use of an extensive collection that is often removed from its original context. The resulting new associations often reveal the bizarre and humorous aspects of products, with a focus on consumer and entertainment culture. Her works were represented in numerous exhibitions and projects such as in Kunsthaus Hamburg,Sammlung Falckenberg, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, ABC, Galerie Oel-Früh, Kunsthalle Ost, Bridging Cologne, BEEK e.v - space for time-based media and sound, Suburbia Contemporary, among others. She work and practice ranges from solo exhibitions and curation to collaborative, project-based work.
