Winners 2025

Main Prize

Award of Distinction

Honorary Mentions

---

Jury Statement 2025

We are living in a time of rupture, emergence, and collapse.

The ground is shifting beneath our feet—politically, ecologically, socially. Systems are breaking down, and new movements rising. This simultaneity—of upheaval (Umbruch), uprising (Aufbruch), and breakdown (Abbruch)—defines the global condition of 2025. Amid multiple crises, the world is re-arming at a historically alarming rate. Investment in military infrastructure, surveillance, and weaponized borders is soaring while peace processes falter, civic freedoms are being eroded, and the scale and frequency of ecological disasters are accelerating. From Gaza to Sudan to Goma, from Ukraine to Myanmar, intolerance and war has become a permanent fixture, not a last resort.

And yet, in the middle of this fractured juncture, art insists on life.

This year, the State of the ART(ist) Award received an extraordinary 506 submissions from 76 countries. The response reflects the growing urgency—and the unyielding determination—of artists to claim spaces in the global conversation. We were struck by the breadth and intensity of the works submitted. We particularly welcomed a new wealth of submissions from across the African continent, showing great talent and humor, and illuminating structural injustices born of colonial legacies, conflict and ecological degradation. A quarter of submissions came from individuals with diverse and intersectional identities, and the overall gender distribution was almost balanced.

The jury encountered works shaped by displacement, censorship, war, and climate collapse, but also courage, solidarity, and imagination. Artists shared not only stories of survival, but radical acts of world-building—developing communal tools, reviving ancestral knowledge, creating safe digital zones, and staging acts of protest that cannot be erased. They reminded us that in many places, to make art is to take great risks.

Although risk was a criteria of eligibility, our task as jurors was to center artistic excellence, rather than biography. And yet, the reality of risk was ever-present. Many submissions were created under surveillance, in exile, or in fragile, rapidly shifting conditions. What we encountered was not merely artwork about danger—it was often art despite of it.

The State of the ART(ist) Initiative stands firmly for freedom of expression and the autonomy of artistic thought. It refuses the logic of collective blame or political scapegoating. The artists selected here are not the agents of governments or systems—they are critical observers, activists, visionaries, and truth-tellers in their own right.

To every artist who shared their work with us, please accept our words of sincere appreciation. Thank you. You have not only given us insight into this turbulent moment, but shown us how resistance, mourning, and dreaming can coexist.

Your voices matter. Your art matters.

Sergio Fontanella, Marita Muukkonen, Ivor Stodolsky, Simon Mraz, Christl Baur