Nafis Fathollahzadeh: Ruckhaberle Award 2023-2024
Künstlerhof Frohnau is pleased to announce that Nafis Fathollahzadeh has been awarded the Ruckhaberle Award 2023/24.
Statement by the jury:
“The political urgency and quality of Nafis Fathollahzadeh’s artistic works and publications were highly convincing. We are pleased to provide space and time for the further development of the photographer and filmmaker’s existing collaboration with anthropologist Şermin Güven on their joint film project Khabur. Fathollahzadeh and Güven engage with photography, archaeology, and cartography as disciplines that emerged from colonial-imperial enterprises. They critically examine the imperial grammar of photographic archives and explore how these can be recycled, unlearned, and reimagined. We are excited to see the conceptual and formal transformation of a cinematic approach within the framework of Nafis Fathollahzadeh’s first solo exhibition in Berlin.”
Nafis Fathollahzadeh is a Berlin-based artist and researcher from Iran. They work at the intersection of artistic research, video art, and photography and are the artistic director and co-editor of Momentography of a Failure, a multidisciplinary platform for collaborative thinking, collaboration, mapping, and publishing. Fathollahzadeh was a fellow of the Rosa Luxemburg Research Program Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies and is a member of EUME: Forum Transregionale Studien. For the project Momentography of a Failure, they were awarded the Prize of the German Society for Photography and received the DAAD’s international artist fellowship.
The Ruckhaberle Award is dedicated to artists who develop innovative forms of engagement with political issues in their work. It was initiated in 2019 by the director of Künstlerhof Frohnau, Kaya Behkalam, in collaboration with the Department of Art and History of the Berlin-Reinickendorf District Office.
This year’s jury members were Pauline Doutreluingne, curator, filmmaker, and artistic director of Kunstverein Arnsberg; Rike Frank, co-director of the European Kunsthalle and managing director of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Program; Boaz Levin, writer, curator, and co-editor of Cabinet magazine’s Kiosk; Setareh Shahbazi, artist, KHF Berlin; and Dr. Sabine Ziegenrücker, director of Museum Reinickendorf.
The nominators were: Andrea Thal, Annette Maechtel, Nina Tabassomi, Sarah Rifky, Frauke Boggasch, Angelika Stepken, Elke aus dem Moore, Yorgos Sapountzis, Azin Feizabadi, Assaf Gruber, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhisvili, Ulf Aminde, Surya Gied, and Annette Frick.