Reimagining centuries of craftsmanship traditions, questioning and subverting women’s role in society, or blurring the boundaries of technology and art, these artists are venturing beyond disciplines in search of creativity, authenticity, and a portrayal of the contemporary era. Discover the artists and the spellbinding themes they delve into, receiving well-deserved recognition for their work.
As markers of cultural relevance and creative innovation, recognising and celebrating artistic excellence, art awards play a vital role in the art world. They not only provide visibility and validation for artists but also help shape cultural conversations and future trajectories within the community, broadening the boundaries of the craft. As some of the honours are only just entering their next edition, the artists we present to you include both this year’s and last year’s recipients. Keep an eye on these talents and their journeys, reshaping the art world.
Chinecherem Peace Ifedilichukwu
Winner of the Kuenyehia Prize for Contemporary Art 2024
Chinecherem Peace Ifedilichukwu‘s intricate, community-based works are made through Isijiakwa, a traditional wax-resist dyeing process native to south-eastern Nigeria, incorporating Uli symbols, ancient Igbo symbolic motifs. Framing these visual elements and methods as cultural declarations, this Nigerian artist initiates a conversation with her ancestry, reawakening symbols at the edge of disappearance and translating them into a contemporary visual language.
Through Isijiakwa, she guides these fabric-like narratives, where colour becomes synonymous with life and hope. The figures depicted echo both the strength and the vulnerability of womanhood, in turn interrogating the harsh realities women face. Her work becomes a powerful medium, bridging forgotten wisdom with the present, and aiding in navigating the complexities of identity, memory, resilience, and healing.
Ifedilichukwu was awarded the Kuenyehia Prize for Contemporary Art, set up by Professor Elikem Nutifafa Kuenyehia in 2014. The last edition attracted submissions from over 200 artists and honoured some of the most exciting voices in contemporary African Art in April 2025. The prize is focused on supporting young, emerging, and mid-career African artists to continue the development of a local and international art market and advance education in the visual arts in Africa.
Pris Roos
Winner of the NN Art Award at Art Rotterdam 2025
Rotterdam-based artist Pris Roos is also a teacher, curator, and storyteller. She grew up in her family’s toko – an Indonesian shop – which became her main source of inspiration today. Remembering it as a vibrant experience, saturated with scents, food, colours, and most of all – community and shared stories, their toko holds a rich heritage. Her multidisciplinary practice ranges across painting, video, installation, performance, and spoken word.
Through her work, Roos addresses themes of identity, migration, and memory, depicting people in situations in her expressive, vivid style. She literally takes a different point of view – carrying the audience to a viewpoint above, under, or diagonally, from her subjects – breaking through the conventional portrait.
Pris Roos won the NN Art Award 2025, awarded at Art Rotterdam in April 2025. This contemporary art prize for talented artists educated in the Netherlands, whose work is exhibited at the fair, highlights the quality of Dutch art education. NN awards a prize of 10,000 euros and purchases work of one or more of the nominees for their corporate collection. The next edition will be held at Art Rotterdam in March 2026.
Arpita Akhanda
Winner of the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2025
Growing up in a family marked by the traumatic memories of displacement during the Partition of India in 1947, Arpita Akhanda’s work delves into the intricate relationship between present experiences and past trauma. Diving into intergenerational memories, family archives, and a search for a sense of home and belonging, she works through the notion of “the body as a memory collector”.
Her practice spans across mediums – from photography and video to paper weaving, performance, drawing, and installation. By researching through these disciplines with the body as a repository of memories and a site of post-memorial reconstruction, Akhanda also explores personal histories often overshadowed by institutional narratives. Through staged photography and mise-en-scène, she embarks on an endeavour to decolonise memories from her family’s extensive material and oral archive, reshaping their narratives and reclaiming agency.
The metaphor of weaving in her work stands for an intertwining of memories and contemporary existence, creating a fragmented or pixelated visual language which speaks for forgotten and lost narratives. This is what Dendritic Data lb presents, and for which Akhanda was awarded the Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Launched in 2003 and held annually, the Sovereign Asian Art Prize is now recognised as the most established and prestigious annual Asian-Pacific art award. With its goal to increase the international exposure of artists in the region, it raises funds for programmes that support disadvantaged children using expressive arts.
Zhanna Kadyrova
Winner of the Her Art Prize 2025
Kyiv-based artist Zhanna Kadyrova is known for creating site-specific interventions with local building materials like glass, tiles, and cement, and the objects she makes from them. In her practice, she centres on the immediate surroundings of her pieces – such as the exhibition space itself – in order to question their context in relation to the onward progression of time and history.
Making the choice to stay in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, her practice today is in direct reaction to this violence, and bears expression of civil resistance. It takes on the role of a witness to resilience in the face of armed conflict – both hers and the community surrounding her.
Her series Refugees (2023) was presented at Art Paris by Galleria Continua as part of the Out of Bounds themed focus by guest curator Simon Lamunière. The series – documenting the lives of public buildings in the aftermath of bombings, with the absence of people emphasising the traces left by them – was awarded the Fair’s Her Art Prize. The prize was launched this year by Marie-Claire and Boucheron and focuses on rewarding a woman artist and her bold body of work. Kadyrova received a financial prize, along with a domestic and international promotional campaign. Her Art Prize will be coming back next year during the 28th edition of Art Paris in April 2026.
Pippilotti Rist
Winner of the Sikkens Prize 2024
Pipilotti Rist, “the mother of video art”, was born in the Swiss Rhine Valley and has been a vivid figure in the arts since the mid-1980s. Her work has grown alongside technical developments, and she has kept a playful air of exploration of its new possibilities. Proposing footage resembling a collective brain, her large video projections and digital manipulations have developed a practice that draws life from vulnerability. Simultaneously convinced and confident, fluid, and free, Rist balances between playful and serious, sensual and protesting, conversing with the times through both fun and confrontation.
Her video installation Wasting Life On You is being projected on the reflective facade of the Boijmans Depot in Rotterdam – a place where many people meet, sit and experience the work of art, take pictures and dance on the slow-moving video projection on the ground. Casual passers-by are entranced by the changing patterns and shapes that move over the building and on the ground.
The Sikkens Prize has a long tradition of rewarding social, cultural and scientific developments that give colour a special role in society. At the award show in October 2024, Rist has been praised for the intentional way in which she employs colour in her work, making it feel like a sincere tribute to freedom. The Sikkens Prize takes place every two years.
Marzena Abrahamik
Awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship 2025
Based in Chicago and holding an MFA from Yale University, Marzena Abrahamik is a photographer inspired by this discipline’s ability to change our visual sensibility, and is driven by personal experiences to navigate the interconnections of portraiture and feminist modes of identification. Exploring personal histories, attachments to unachievable and necessary for survival fantasies, and communal formations and transformations, she focuses on photography’s objective character for representation.
For instance, her project Underground is an exploration of women’s roles in heavy industry, centring on the Polish mining industry, following their contributions within mining communities and the environmental impacts of extraction, as well as the resulting cultural transformations. Through photographs shifting in scale from minerals to landscapes, and from panoramic views of communities to environmental portraits, Underground explored gender, labour, and environmental challenges, and their intersections in regions shaped by resource extraction.
Marzena Abrahamik is one of this year’s John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellows. The fellowship programme is offered to anyone in pursuit of a scholarship in any discipline and any type of art form. In its 100th iteration, The Guggenheim Fellowship has been received by 198 talents, throughout 53 disciplines, including broad science and sections such as Choreography, Fine Arts, Fiction, Music Composition, Poetry, and Photography. Abrahamik has been awarded with the Fellowship in Photography, alongside Farah Al Qasimi, Nina Berman, Phil Chang, Denis Defibaugh, Eli Durst, Martine Gutierrez, Tommy Kha, Dionne Lee, Mikael Levin, Miranda Lichtenstein, Justin Maxon, Accra Shepp, Richard T. Walker, Shoshannah White, Carla Williams, and Sabiha Çimen. The 2026 Fellowship will open for applications in late summer 2025.
Nikita Gale
Winner of the Bucksbaum Award 2024
Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles whose work investigates the relationship between materials, power, and attention. Focusing on the notion that the structures that shape our attention determine who and what is seen, heard, remembered, and believed, Gale’s practice examines how silence, noise, and visibility function as political positions and conditions. Through installations often made of concrete, barricades, video and automated sound and lighting, Gale blurs disciplinary boundaries, engaging with questions of mediation and automation in contemporary performance.
The artist’s work points to the ways that technology not only functions as an extension and amplification of the body but also as a means by which labour and violence are displaced and concentrated, by approaching reproduction as a mechanism that connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification through both biological and industrial processes.
The artist’s work was recently exhibited in the 2024 Whitney Biennial in New York and received the Whitney Museum’s prestigious Bucksbaum Award. Established in 2000 by longtime Whitney trustee Melva Bucksbaum and her family, the award is given as part of each Whitney Biennial in recognition of a talented, imaginative artist, exhibited at the Biennial. The winner is considered to have the potential to make a lasting impact on the history of American art. The 2026 Whitney Biennial will open in March.
Denyse Gawu-Mensah
Winner of the Yaa Asantewaa Prize 2024
Ghanaian artist Denyse Gawu-Mensah’s multidisciplinary practice is rooted in a deep connection to materials, memories, and the intimate stories they carry. Reimagining past narratives in ways that invite contemporary reflections, she engages with the intersections of history, memory, and personal experience. She collects objects, photographs, and stories from Ghana’s material past, an act which has become the focal point of her creative process.
Weaving together fragments of time and history into evocative, layered compositions, she embraces the vulnerability and beauty of memory, using historical photographs, archival materials, and found objects to capture the essence of Ghana’s post-independence era of the 1960s-1980s. Reflecting on what is passed down, what is lost, and how the domestic sphere – once a site for intimate familial narratives – holds both sentimental significance, as well as the collective history of a culture.
Initiated in 2021 by Gallery 1957, the Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize is the first-ever art prize dedicated to women artists living and working in Ghana. Carrying the name of the prominent Ghanaian Queen Mother, the prize aims to support emerging and established artists across the country and the diaspora. Beyond the financial support, Gallery 1957 aims to give shortlisted artists a platform for showcasing their work, as well as an international stage. Gawu-Mensah was awarded the Prize in October 2024, along with an artist residency and a solo exhibition at Gallery 1957.
Femke Herregraven
Winner of the Theodora Niemeijer Prijs 2025
An alumnus of Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2017-2018), who also obtained the Creator Doctus title at the Sandberg Institute in 2024, Femke Herregraven expands on the effects of abstract value systems on landscapes, ecosystems, historiography, and daily life, particularly focusing on the high level of abstraction in financial systems, highlighting their absurdity. Her hybrid installations, at times consisting of sculptures, drawings, immersive soundscapes, woodcarving, and films, are deeply rooted in her research. Fascinated by the interaction between financial markets, risks, and the physical world, Herregraven explores elusive systems that humans develop and refine to the point of abstraction, making them comprehensible only to a small group of specialists – systems that both shape and disrupt daily life.
In February 2025, she won the Theodora Niemeijer Prize, the largest unrestricted art prize in the Netherlands. Initiated in 2012 by the Niemeijer Fund Foundation, the Prize is awarded once every two years. It aims to increase the representation and appreciation of female artists, drawing attention to contemporary female mid-career artists who have built up a consistent oeuvre, for whom the prize supports their development and contributes to visibility as artists. Funding is also allocated to the purchase of a work by a Dutch art museum.
Ashfika Rahman
Winner of the Future Generation Art Prize 2024
Based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Ashfika Rahman often works with communities to give shape to narratives which have been silenced. Drawing from the sociopolitical, religious, and gender repercussions of the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent, her work remains a fragile, sublime, humble testament to collective trauma. Territories continually divided by various geopolitical powers become the basis for Rahman’s striving towards community building and repair.
Her work, consisting of photography, prints, text and sculpture, weaves a floating embroidery unfolding as a river, collecting and connecting fragments of land and bodies, linking the human condition and aspiration for gender justice with mythology and spirituality. And was awarded the Future Generation Art Prize in October 2024 in Kyiv.
Initiated by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in 2009, the Future Generation Art Prize is a biannual global contemporary art prize open to all artists aged 35 or younger. It introduces an open platform that allows artists to be expressive and politically engaged. Presenting new works and recent projects by the shortlisted artists, the prize serves as a contribution to the open participation of younger artists in the dynamic cultural development of societies in global transition. Alongside Rahman, this year’s Special Prize was awarded to Tara Abdullah Mohammed Sharif, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Dina Mimi, Hira Nabi, Ipeh Nur, and Zhang Xu Zhan.
Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Kasamaponn Saengsuratham, Arjin Thongyuukong, and Krongpong Langkhapin
Winners of the Grand Prize 2025 Taoyuan International Art Award
The Thai collective comprises Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Kasamaponn Saengsuratham, Arjin Thongyuukong, and Krongpong Langkhapin. Their interdisciplinary collaboration to create the work Red Eagle Sangmorakot: No More Hero In His Story is exhibited at the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan, having won the Grand Prize of the Taoyuan International Art Award.
The collective harnesses Muay Thai as a narrative method, pairing anthropological research, documentary and archival material with artistic tools. With performance and moving image, their work brings to light Cold War politics and nationalism, and the ways they have shaped society historically. The piece examines the archetypical notion of the “hero” within Thailand’s broader cultural currents and the ideological influence it brings. Its ethnographic nature manages to resonate with the audience, utilising its artistic character to go beyond simply documentary.
The Taoyuan International Art Award is a key project of the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts, focused on contributing to the international art network and global perspectives. The Award accepts global submissions one year and creates an exhibition the next, offering artists time for creation and exhibition planning. The next edition guidelines will be announced near the end of 2025, and the exhibition is expected to be held at the Qingpu Main Building.
