The Worpswede Scholarship, awarded for the second time by Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle and Worpswede Künstler*innenHäuser e.V. 2024, goes this year to artist and Burg Giebichenstein graduate Emika Sekine. Upon receiving the scholarship at the beginning of August, she will spend three months working in one of the studio flats in Worpswede.

Emika Sekine, who completed her art studies at the BURG in 2023, impressed with the artistic richness of her works. "In her sculptures and arrangements, the artist plays with forms of reality in a virtuoso manner, overlaying, distorting and rearranging them. These rearrangements create an interesting dialogue between perception and logic. Her works are surprising due to their multifaceted materiality and the urge to explore that they contain," the jury said in its statement. In her artistic practice, Emika Sekine focuses on the properties of sculptures and "ghosts", in particular on their correspondence. Using a wide variety of materials and techniques, she deals with ambivalent themes such as past and present, contexts and individuality, fiction and reality as well as seriousness and humour.

About Emika Sekine: Emika Sekine completed her bachelor's degree in sculpture at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, Japan, in 2013. From 2017 to 2022, she studied sculpture/metal with Prof Andrea Zaumseil at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. In 2023, she received her diploma in Sculpture/Materiality and Space under Prof Karsten Födinger. Sekine has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany and Japan and presented her work in an open studio in Switzerland. For her artistic work, she was supported by the NOMURA Foundation in Japan in 2019, 2020 and 2021 and received a scholarship from the Yoshino Gips Art Foundation for the "Grants for Overseas Study by Young Artists" in 2022. Her works were awarded second place in the FÖHL Art Prize of the Sculpture Competition in Germany in 2018. In 2020 she took third place in the art competition (collage) of the Münzenberg Forum Berlin and was nominated for the 26th Federal Prize for Art Students in 2023. To the artist's website: www.emika-sekine.com