Major art world events were held this year, such as the Documenta in Kassel, the Venice Biennale, or the Berlin Biennale, which challenged us to rethink and reinvent ways of living together, with a focus on issues of ecology, de-colonialism, neo-feminism, migration and capitalism.

I hope that 2023 and the years that follow will continue this momentum and that it will not just be a trend. I was delighted to see that the Luxembourg artist Tina Gillen and curator Christophe Gallois offered students from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp the opportunity to work on a research project about our ways of inhabiting the world and our relationship with the living. I am also happy to see the Leap Prize awarded to the artist Stefania Crişan, with a work that is simultaneously ritual, poetic, sororal and committed, in response to an ecological disaster. So I hope that 2023 will be collective, reflective, experimental and political with new aesthetic promises.

As co-president of the association of visual artists in Luxembourg AAPL (Association des artistes plasticiens du Luxembourg - founded in 2013 and accredited by the Ministry of Culture since 2018), I am also interested, together with my colleagues, in the evolution of the professionalisation of Luxembourg artist. Considering the progress made in recent years by the Ministry of Culture in the framework of the Kulturentwécklungsplang, and the recent creation of a new support body for promotion and dissemination, the Kultur LX, we feel confident about the coming year.  I also hope that the adventure of the European Capital of Culture will leave a lasting impression on the public, the municipalities and the decision-makers, and that we will continue to give the means (financial, timewise and creative) to the artists to be able to extend certain projects, and to start new ones that are just as ambitious.

The AAPL is also working on a number of projects that should have a positive impact on the profession in the years to come. This year we have been actively working on the draft law on public commissions of artistic works, launched by the Ministry of Culture. This law proposes a new committee for artistic development which will have the task of raising awareness of public art and supporting the various actors, including municipalities, funds, artists etc., in the development of their public art projects. This should allow for greater collaboration between project holders and artists. The AAPL is also working on the recommendation of tariffs within the profession, we are currently in dialogue with artists, museums, cultural institutions and the Ministry of Culture in the elaboration of this project, which will see the light of day early next year. The association also manages artists' studios at the Verlorenkost, a place for creation, research, collaboration and exchange, which has found its place in the Luxembourg artistic landscape and from which more and more artists' initiatives are emerging.

All of these steps represent progress for the artists, but also for the Luxembourg cultural landscape and will benefit the public in the long term.

About Justine Blau and the AAPL

Justine Blau is a visual artist who adopts a multidisciplinary approach in her work, mixing sculptures, installations, photographs and videos. Through her projects she deals with ontological questions about the relationship between man and nature, the visual image and the living world. Her creations have been exhibited in Luxembourg and in Europe, including recently Vida Inerte at the Centre d'art Nei Liicht in Dudelange, from which a publication The Veil Of Nature will soon be published by K.Verlag in Berlin. She is also finalising a short film Phusis,, which deals with the soap bubble as an allegory of ephemerality, for which she was awarded a Carte Blanche by the Film Fund. In 2019 she was in artist residency at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris and will go in 2023 to the Fonderie Darling [art gallery in Montreal], as well as to La Gare de Matapédia in Gaspésie [region in Canada]. She is co-president of the AAPL, the association of visual artists of Luxembourg, which aims at dialogue and exchange between artists and aims to represent and defend the material and moral interests as well as the social rights of the profession in Luxembourg.