Award ​recipients

Arcimovich is a researcher and author from Minsk and, currently, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Erfurt in Germany. Working across art history, theatre studies, sociology, and curatorial practice, Arcimovich investigates independent Belarusian art during political transitions and displacement. Since 2011, Arcimovich has been an active member of the Belarusian alternative cultural community and has provided a critical structural link by mapping, documenting, and analysing independent Belarusian art from her base in Germany. The jury recognises her research, archiving initiatives, and critical writing in which she addresses questions of institutional structures, gender, and memory. She is the founder of the Zerne Performing Arts Platform and co-editor of and contributor to pARTisan (also published as pARTisanka). Her curatorial projects include mapping the contemporary art of Belarus in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the exhibition Ludmila Rusava: A Total Performance at the Ў Gallery of Contemporary Art in Minsk (2015), and managing initiatives such as the Kaptaruny Art Village. Her scholarship includes the book Minsk: Non-conformism of the 1980s (2016), studies on the working conditions of Belarusian artists, and her recent essay collection Manifest einer Gartenlosen (2025), which analyses the broader societal and cultural impacts following the democratic uprising in Belarus in ​2020.

As an art historian and theorist, Esanu investigates the institutionalisation of artistic practice during political and economic transitions in these regions. In doing this, he pays special attention to the emergence of “contemporary art” in relation to global neoliberalisation. In his writings and curatorial work, he also explores the legacies of modernist aesthetics and exhibitionary ideologies. The jury values his structural analysis of modern and contemporary art within transregional and materialist frameworks. Esanu is a curator, art writer, and educator. In the second half of the 1990s, he served as the founding director and curator of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Chișinău and established alternative frameworks for contemporary art in Moldova. During his tenure at the American University of Beirut (AUB), where he founded the AUB Art Galleries (2012) and curated most of the exhibitions, he has applied a comparative model that analyses post-socialist and postcolonial conditions as they are manifested in the field of arts. The jury also values his scholarly contributions, including his work as one of the founding editors of the ARTMargins journal (since 2011) and on monographs such as Transition in Post-Soviet Art: The Collective Actions Group Before and After 1989 (2013) and The Postsocialist Contemporary: The Institutionalization of Artistic Practices in Eastern Europe After 1989 (2021). He has also edited volumes such as Art, Awakening, and Modernity in the Middle East: The Arab Nude (2018) and Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization: A Transregional Perspective (2021). Currently, he lives and works between Tokyo and Beirut, where he directs and curates the AUB Art Galleries and serves as associate professor at the Department of Art and Art History at the ​AUB.

Karavai is a cultural worker, curator, and essayist. She has created diverse support structures for contemporary art outside metropolitan centres that transform temporary wartime crisis interventions into sustainable, long-term regional institutional strategies. After fleeing Donetsk in 2014, when her workplace, the art centre Izolyatsia, was seized and turned into an illegal prison, she focused on connecting arts and community work. She co-founded the project space Asortymentna Kimnata (2018), the residency house Khata-Maysternya (2014), both in Ivano-Frankivsk, and the publishing project ilostmylibrary (2024). Following the 2022 Russian invasion, she organised critical emergency responses, including an art evacuation initiative, a crisis residency for displaced cultural workers, a nomadic School of Contemporary Art fra fra fra, and was involved in establishing the Museum Crisis Centre to assist regional institutions at risk. Karavai manages programmes bridging the gap between artists in exile and those remaining in Ukraine. Currently she is based in Kyiv, exploring themes of peripheries, absence, as well as vitality and death. She runs the School of Death, a self-organised initiative that examines the collective culture of mourning through performative and collaborative practices, such as Death Cafés – group discussions around personal questions regarding death and grief. Alona Karavai’s efforts at building flexible institutional structures that operate during severe crises are commendable. The jury recognises her for her practice, which provides a methodology for art support that extends beyond emergency preservation into long-term community ​development.