The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, in cooperation with the Freunde der Kunstsammlung (Friends K20 K21) and with generous financial support from the Reydan + Roger Weiss Foundation, has awarded the new annual art prize K21 Global Art Award since 2023. This year’s award will be presented on October 9, 2025 at K21.
The annual K21 Global Art Award celebrates the vision of emerging and mid-career artists and is offered to internationally recognized artists aged 45 and under. The award supports the museum’s mission to broaden its collection and to acquire new work by artists from diverse regions around the world. It exemplifies the creative and sustained commitment of the Friends K20 K21 in supporting the endeavors of the museum.
K21 is dedicated to current developments in international contemporary art, showcasing paintings, drawings, immersive installations, video works, and multidisciplinary approaches by renowned artists from around the world, including Ed Atkins, Lutz Bacher, Cao Fei, Hito Steyerl, Isaac Julien, Zanele Muholi, Raqs Media Collective, and Ai Weiwei. Beyond presenting its collection and hosting groundbreaking international exhibitions, the museum engages in critical dialogue with diverse communities and strives to expand the understanding of art and culture. K21 remains committed to reflecting on its role in times of global transformations and emerging challenges. With a strong focus on its collection, the museum seeks to enrich and diversify its holdings by embracing the principles of polyphony, globality, and digitalization.
The K21 Global Art Award is advised by a nomination jury composed of four renowned museum directors and curators from across the globe: Doryun Chong (M+, Hong Kong); Koyo Kouoh (Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town); Omar Kholeif (Sharjah Art Foundation, Government of Sharjah, UAE); and Jochen Volz (Pinacoteca de São Paulo).
Each jury member is invited to nominate up to two artists. The short list of nominees is submitted to the selection committee, which selects the winning artist. The selection committee for the 2025 K21 Global Art Award includes Nadia Ismail (Director, Kunsthalle Gießen); Natsuko Rother-Bürling and Lorenzo Salafia (Young Members, Friends of K20 K21); Gabriel Sulkowski (Chairman, Friends of K20 K21); and Anna-Alexandra Pfau (Chairwoman, Friends of K20 K21 and Spokesperson, Stiftung Junge Kunst).
The Friends of K20 K21 acquire works by the selected artist, which are then placed on permanent loan in the museum’s collection. The board of trustees announces the winner.
With a budget of €100,000.-, the K21 Global Art Award holds particular significance. It is unique in its global approach and is among the most generously endowed art prizes in Germany. In 2024, the Friends K20 K21 acquired the video installation “The Second Interrogation” (2022) by Wang Tuo (*1984, Changchun, China). The work has been on permanent loan to the museum and has been exhibited in two rooms at K21 since May 24, 2024. In 2023, the inaugural prize was awarded to artist Senzeni Mthwakazi Marasela (*1977, Thokoza, South Africa).
Nominees for the
K21 Global Art Award 2025
- Simon Fujiwara
- (*1982, London, United Kingdom)
Simon Fujiwara is a British-Japanese artist, born in 1982 in London, living and working in Berlin.
At the core of the artist’s work is a question - what does it mean to be a “Self” in the 21st century? With humour, inventiveness, delight and rigor, his works reflect on existential quandaries such as: how should one construct a self today? How has technology altered our identities? Is there such thing as an authentic ‘me’?
From performative lectures, video installations and paintings, to the creation of entire themed “worlds,” his decade long practice employs a range of artistic strategies that seek to expand our notions of race, gender, national and sexual identities in a world increasingly mediated through technology and images. Often employing and even parodying his own identity in his work, he confronts these potent cultural topics in unexpected ways—mining fields such as advertising or theme park design or drawing on art historical strategies from Dadaism to Pop and Conceptual art.
His work is informed by his early studies in architecture and operate as ‘imaginary structures’ in which ethical and moral conundrums can coexist with the fantastical, surreal and absurd. As such, his work creates spaces in which disconcerting aspects of life under 21st century capitalism can be examined in a playful and even pleasurable way.
- Celia Hempton
- (*1981, Stroud, United Kingdom)
Celia Hempton’s practice spans painting, performance, and installation, contending with the ethics of looking, the consumption of images, and the bodily gaze, within the digital sphere in particular. Hempton’s output is defined by exercises in performative painting, and anchored in an awareness of her own positioning at the time of observing subjects and making work. Her work both challenges and acknowledges the tropes of history painting, both through the prism of digital mediation and from the immediacy of in-person encounters with sites characterized by a sense of disturbance, unpredictability, or instability.
Solo presentations include “Transplant”, Phillida Reid, London (2024); “Art Night”, ICA London (2016); “Vug”, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Germany (2013); and the performances “Tor” at Fiorucci Art Trust, Stromboli and Serpentine Galleries, London (2016).
Her work has been included in the group exhibitions “The Living End”: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020, MCA Chicago (2024/2025); “British Art Show 9”, Hayward Gallery Touring, UK (2021/2022); “My Life in the Metaverse”, Manarat Al Saadiyat, UAE (2022); “Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today,” ICA Boston (2018); “Kathy Acker: Who Wants to Be Human All the Time”, Performance Space New York (2018); “The Public Body .03”, Artspace Sydney (2018); “Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966)”, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); Gwangju Biennale (2014), amongst others. It is held in international private and public collections including The Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin, Colombia; The British Council; and the Government Art Collection, UK.
- Hashel Al Lamki
- (*1986, United Arab Emirates)
Hashel Al Lamki is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is shaped by a dual gaze—one informed by his East African heritage and the other by the Bedouin culture of Al Ain. Growing up in the shadow of Jebel Hafeet, he witnessed firsthand the profound spatial and social transformations driven by the Gulf’s rapid development.
In 2011, Al Lamki earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design, New York City. His academic rigor is complemented by extensive fieldwork, including philanthropic initiatives in Guatemala, Haiti, and the U.S., where he worked on sustainability and social outreach projects. After seven years in New York, he pursued post-consumerist waste solutions in Amsterdam and Taos, New Mexico, before returning to Abu Dhabi in 2014.
A recipient of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, Al Lamki co-founded Bait 15 in 2018, a UAE-based artist-run space pioneering critical discourse within the region’s art ecosystem. His practice explores the landscapes of the UAE and beyond, blending environmental consciousness with themes of life cycles, climate change, and urban evolution. Working across painting, sculpture, and digital media, he integrates natural pigments from the SWANA region, reinforcing his commitment to sustainability.
Al Lamki has exhibited in major international biennials, including the Sharjah Biennial (2025), Gwangju Biennale (2024), and Les Rencontres de Bamako (2024), and Lyon Biennale (2022)
An advocate for ecological responsibility, he actively tracks his carbon footprint as a GCC member and champions circularity in his creative process.
- Sallisa Rosa
- (*1986, Goiás, Brazil)
Sallisa Rosa is currently undertaking an artistic residency at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. She explores art as a journey rooted in intuitive experiences linked to fiction, territory and nature. Her work delves into themes of memory and forgetting, and strategies for shaping the future. Rosa is particularly interested in creating large-format installations in public and institutional spaces. Her works incorporate earth through various mediums, such as planting, clay and ceramics, as well as photography, video, performance and, most recently drawing. She works a lot with materials collected in nature and in cities, such as collected clay, earth, branches, wood and reuses various materials, including her own works. Central to her career is a commitment to an artistic practice aimed at collective construction, where actions unfold to culminate in shared knowledge.
She had solo exhibitions at Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo (2025); Pina Contemporânea, São Paulo (2024); and at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (2021). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at SNAP, Shanghai (2023); Visual Arts Center, University of Texas (2022); Théâtre de L’Usine, Geneva (2022); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2021); Paço das Artes, São Paulo (2021); Frestas – Trienal de Artes, Sorocaba (2020/2021); Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, New York (2020); Museu de Arte do Rio, (2020, 2017); Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2022, 2020, 2019); Banco do Brasil Cultural Center, Rio de Janeiro (2019); Caruaru Clay Biennial (2019); and Guatemala Biennale (2023) among others. Rosa was nominated for the PIPA Prize (2022, 2020) and is a recipient of the Prince Claus Fund Seed Prize (2021).
- Sin Wai Kin
- (*1991, Toronto, Canada)
Sin Wai Kin currently lives and works in London. They bring fantasy to life through storytelling in moving image, performance, writing, and print. Drawing on experiences of binary categories, their work realizes alternate worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification and consciousness.
Sin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2022 and the 2024 Film London Jarman award. They were the recipient of the 24th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel (2023). Their solo exhibition The “Time of Our Lives” opened in March 2025 at Blindspot Gallery, Hongkong; marking the final stop of a touring solo exhibition that has travelled to Accelerator, Stockholm; Kunsthall Trondheim; and Canal Projects, New York. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Mudam Luxembourg (2024); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York (2024), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2023); and Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2023).
Recent group exhibitions include Lahore Biennale 03 (2024); “Greater Toronto Art” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2024); Somerset House, London (2024/2023); Mudam Luxembourg (2023); Tate Liverpool (2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022); and the British Museum, London (2022). Sin’s works are held in the collections of Vancouver Art Gallery; Tate Collection, London; the British Museum Prints & Drawings, London; White Rabbit Gallery, Chippendale; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; the Ingram Collection of Modern British Art, London; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong; and M+, Hong Kong, among others.
- Tadáskía
- (*1993, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Tadáskía lives in Rio de Janeiro. The different offshoots of Tadáskía’s work share a throughline in her affinity with drawing. Simultaneously markings and erasures, her traces in dry pastels, colored pencil, pen or nail polish create graphic tangles that evoke fluttering beings without turning them recognizable. Her wooden sculptures are akin to screens that, without separating spaces, are crossed through with poles that render them porous. This is a dance between revelation and concealment. The interaction between pictorial content and writing, common to so much of her work, produces resonance between the image and the written word while ushering in ambiguities that make fixed meaning impossible. In videos and photographs that Tadáskía calls “apparitions”, actions of disguising and transforming the depicted bodies place domestic and familiar environments in unrest.
Among her recent exhibitions are “Tadáskía and Ana Cláudia Almeida: A Joyner/Giuffrida Visiting Artists Program”, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2024); “Projects: Tadáskía”, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024); “Flores e frutas”, Galpão Bela Maré, Rio de Janeiro (2023). The artist was a highlight in the “35th Bienal de São Paulo – Coreografias do impossível” (2023) and has also taken part in the group shows “One Becomes Many”, Perez Art Museum Miami (2024); “The Disagreement: A Theatre of Statements”, Neuer Kunstverein Wien (2024); “37° Panorama da Arte Brasileira – Sob as cinzas, brasa”, MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2023); “The Silence of Tired Tongues”, Framer Framed, Amsterdam (2022); “Eros Rising: Visions of the Erotic in Latin American Art”, ISLAA – Institute for Studies on Latin American Art in New York (2022).
The artist has works in important public collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Kadist Foundation, Paris.
Previous Winners of the K21 Global Art Award
Wang Tuo
Senzeni Mthwakazi Marasela
Nomination Jury 2023 – 2027
- Doryun Chong
- M+
- Hong Kong
Doryun Chong is Deputy Director and Curatorial and Chief Curator of M+, a new museum of visual culture that opened its Herzog & de Meuron–designed building in 2021 in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District. Appointed as the inaugural Chief Curator in 2013, Chong oversees all curatorial activities and programs, including acquisitions, exhibitions, learning and public programs, and digital initiatives encompassing the museum’s three main disciplinary areas of design and architecture, moving image, and visual art. Some of the exhibitions he has curated or co-curated at M+ include “Mobile M+: Live Art” (2015), “Tsang Kin-Wah: The Infinite Nothing, Hong Kong in Venice” (2015), “Samson Young: Songs for Disaster Relief World Tour” (2018), “Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint” (2018), and “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now” (2022). Prior to joining M+, Chong worked in various curatorial capacities at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2003–2009) and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009–2013).
- Koyo Kouoh
- Zeitz MOCAA
- Cape Town, South Africa
Koyo Kouoh has been Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa, since May 2019 and curator of the 61th Venice Biennale in 2026. Prior to this appointment, she was the founding Artistic Director of RAW Material Company, a centre for art, knowledge, and society in Dakar, Senegal. She has organized meaningful and timely exhibitions such as “Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists”, first shown at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium in 2015. She curated “Still (the) Barbarians”, the 37th EVA International, the Ireland Biennial in Limerick in 2016 and participated in the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, with the deeply researched exhibition project “Dig Where You Stand” (2018), a show within a show, drawn from the collections of the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. She was the initiator of the research project “Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy”, co-curated with Rasha Salti at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany (2015 – 2018). Active in the critical field of the arts community in a pan-African and international scope, Kouoh has a remarkable list of publications under her name, including “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting” (2022); “Shooting Down Babylon” (2022), the first monograph on the work of the South African artist Tracey Rose; “Breathing out School: RAW Académie” (2021); “Condition Report on Art History in Africa” (2020); “Word!Word?Word! Issa Samb and The Undecipherable Form” (2013); and “Condition Report on Building Art Institutions in Africa” (2012), to name a few. She has served as Curator of the Educational and Artistic Programme of 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London, United Kingdom and New York, United States (2013 – 2017), as well as on the curatorial teams for documenta 12 (2007) and dOCUMENTA (13) (2012). Kouoh is the recipient of the Grand Prix Meret Oppenheim 2020, the Swiss Grand Award for Art that honors achievements in the fields of art, architecture, critique and exhibitions. During her tenure at Zeitz MOCAA, her curatorial work has focused on in-depth solo exhibitions of African and African-descent artists. As such, she has organised exhibitions with Otobong Nkanga, Johannes Phokela, Senzeni Marasela, Abdoulaye Konate and Tracey Rose. She lives and works between Cape Town, South Africa; Dakar, Senegal; and Basel, Switzerland.
- Omar Kholeif
- Sharjah Art Foundation
- United Arab Emirates
Professor Dr. Omar Kholeif CF FRSA is an author, historian, and curator. They have worked as an artist, broadcaster, filmmaker, editor, publisher, and museum director. Over the last two decades, their work has concentrated on the evolving nature of networked image culture in relation to intersectional questions emerging in the field and study of ethnicity, race, and gender. Their research has come to life in over 70 exhibitions, and in 40 authored, co-authored, and/or edited books, which have been translated into 16 languages. Dr. Kholeif currently serves as Director of Collections and Senior Curator, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, Visiting Professor at MIMA School of Arts and Creative Industries, Teesside University and Director of artPost21, a not-for-profit agency that supports culture from the margins. Their monograph, Internet_Art: “From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs” was published by Phaidon in 2023 becoming a non-fiction hardback bestseller. Forthcoming books include “Helen Khal: Gallery One and Beirut in the 1960s” and “Magda Stawarska (imagine/otherwise)” with Lubaina Himid.
- Jochen Volz
- Pinacoteca de São Paulo
- Brazil
Jochen Volz is the General Director of Pinacoteca de São Paulo. He was the curator of the Brazilian Pavilion at the 57th Biennale di Venezia (2017) and was the chief curator of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016). Between 2012 and 2015 he was Head of Programmes at the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior, he was a curator at the Instituto Inhotim, Minas Gerais, since 2004, where he has served as General Director between 2005 and 2007 and Artistic Director between 2007 and 2012. In 2009, he organized “Fare Mondi / Making Worlds”, the international section of the 53rd International Venice Biennale together with Daniel Birnbaum. In 2006, he guest curated for the 27th São Paulo Biennial. Between 2001 and 2004, he was curator of Portikus Frankfurt am Main. As a critic he is writing for magazines and catalogues.
Selection Committee
K21 Global Art Award 2025
-
Lorenzo Salafia, Dr. Nadia Ismail, Gabriel Sulkowski, Anna-Alexandra Pfau, Natsuko Rother-Bürling (from left to right), photo: Linda Inconi-Jansen
- Dr. Nadia Ismail
- Director
- Kunsthalle Gießen
- Natsuko Rother-Bürling
- Young Member
- Friends of K20 K21
- Lorenzo Salafia
- Young Member
- Friends of K20 K21
- Gabriel Sulkowski
- Chairman
- Friends of K20 K21
- Anna-Alexandra Pfau
- Chairwoman
- Friends of K20 K21 and spokesperson Stiftung Junge Kunst
Board of Trustees Stiftung Junge Kunst
- Prof. Dr. Susanne Gaensheimer
- Director
- Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
- Dr. Vivien Trommer
- Head of Collections
- Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
- Leopold Freiherr von Diergardt
- Chairman
- Friends of K20 K21
- Anna-Alexandra Pfau
- Board Member
- Friends of K20 K21
- Gabriel Sulkowski
- Board Member
- Friends of K20 K21
