Honours
The Jury of the Hans and Lea Grundig Prize is delighted to honour Cana Bilir-Meier with the prize in the Visual Arts category.
In her films, performances and installations, Cana Bilir-Meier (born 1986 in Munich) demonstrates a deep and continuous commitment to addressing the most pressing issues of our time through visual and textual means.
In her latest exhibition „Stop. Listen. Encounter„, curated by Chana Boekle, Bilir-Meier realised a temporary public sculpture in Dortmund in collaboration with the HSD – Hochschule Düsseldorf, local initiatives and residents. In this work, she uses the aesthetic language of traffic signs to give victims of right-wing, racist and anti-Semitic violence a space in public space.
The jury particularly emphasised Bilir-Meier’s powerful artistic commitment to social and political issues in Germany as well as her unique work at the interface of art and activism. For over a decade, Bilir-Meier has stood for the personal and artistic commitment of victims of discrimination, injustice and violence. As the niece of Semra Ertan, who self-immolated in Hamburg in protest against systemic racism in Germany, Bilir-Meier was co-editor of the bilingual poetry collection ‘Mein Mein Name ist Ausländer | Benim Adım Yabancı’’ (2020), which for the first time publishes texts by Ertan that were not published during his lifetime.
Avi Feldmann/Haleh Redjajan
The jury awarded this year’s prize in the art education category to Henryk Gericke for his project ‘tapetopia – GDR Undergroundtapes’. Gericke, born in 1964 in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, has been working for six years on this series of cassettes and records, which rescues a specific art form ‘in the niche’, namely the GDR subculture of the 1980s, from oblivion.
The recordings of avant-garde, punk and post-punk bands and artists were created as ‘underground art’ outside of the state-run GDR media companies and distribution channels, recorded privately and reproduced on commercially available cassettes, passed on by hand, under the pressure of persecution by the SED security apparatus. There was an inherent moment of ephemerality and precariousness. The artistic networks, structures and alliances of the ‘GDR underground’ were largely destroyed by departures, persecution and bans in the 1980s.
With his edition, which he is publishing – self-financed, with texts in German and English translation – Gericke is preserving the recordings and making them accessible for discussion in the present and future. As an artist who was himself part of the East Berlin subculture in Prenzlauer Berg, he is a recognised expert on the subject. He draws attention to an aspect of (East German) music history that often appears as a side note. The jury recognises Gericke’s work as an important contribution to (sub)cultural history, whose protagonists were ‘unwanted children of the GDR state’, and also to the critical examination of the failed state-socialist attempt.
Klaus Lederer
In her work Unreal Estate, which won the Hans and Lea Grundig Prize 2025, Ksenia Galiaeva explores her complex family history, which draws on Jewish, Polish, German, Tatar and Russian family roots in the context of a collective simulation called the (Post-)Soviet Union (Boris Groys). The work, which consists of a complex of nearly half a dozen different media, is rooted in a portrait of her parents, whose enchanted living spaces and sympathetic appearance mask the horror of her family history lurking behind every object. As survivors of the Holocaust and labour camps, her parents decided to emigrate to Israel at the start of the war in Ukraine, where they live – repeatedly exposed to rocket attacks – in the growing certainty that they will never see their timeless, native Russian garden again.
Ksenia’s stories leap nimbly between her parents‘ life story and her own reality, linking generations, their stories, feelings, pain, traumas and hopes. Her narrative, photographic and filmed scenarios freeze time into a condensed reflection in individual objects such as the apples from the lost garden or the buried silver cutlery that Ksenia tracks down at flea markets.
Great gentleness and patience characterise the gaze of her camera, which curiously explores life, everyday routines, and the history of the family. When her mother picks up Anne Frank’s diary and begins to read it in German, with a strong accent (one can guess where her language skills come from), the moment is marked by the same lightness as the long hours spent in the idyllic garden of the dacha. But time and again, darkness and gloom break into the cheerful mood, reminding us that happiness is fragile and violence cannot be forgotten.
Ksenia Galiaeva has been documenting her parents‘ everyday life for over 25 years and continues to do so even after they moved to the Haifa area in Israel. Since the Russian invasion, the idyllic dacha is no longer accessible to her, as violence once again shapes the Ukrainian landscape, as well as the landscapes in Israel/Palestine.
The elaborately composed film sequences tell a story that remains open and fluid; they offer no conclusion, but remain open and unresolved. They are accompanied by the healing power of nature and the cheerfulness of human relationships that have been cultivated and lived over many decades. In addition to the ease with which Ksenia Galiaeva recounts her complex family history, combining biographical portraiture with essayistic reflection, the jury was particularly impressed by the wit of her visual language and staging, which, despite the seriousness of the subject matter, repeatedly brings a hopeful smile to the viewer’s lips.
Mirjam Zadoff/Jens Heitjohann