Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig

In collaboration with the Association of Friends of the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig (Verein der Förderer des Museums der bildenden Künste Leipzig e. V.), the MdbK recently awarded the MdbK [now]. Supporters' Assoociation Award for the first time. Through this sponsorship award, the Association and the MdbK are underlining their shared commitment to providing targeted support for young artists from the region.

This art prize, of equal value, is aimed at artists under the age of 35 who have completed a degree at an art college in the federal states of the former GDR (excluding Berlin). The winning entries will be presented as part of a joint exhibition at the MdbK. From now on, the prize will be awarded every two years. The winners are selected by a rotating, interdisciplinary panel of experts.   

From more than 160 submissions, the five-member jury has selected four artistic projects that will engage in dialogue with one another in the group exhibition at the MdbK in 2026:

Franzi Goralski works in a research-based, process-oriented and interdisciplinary manner. Franzi Goralski explores alternative ways of living and learning, creating spaces for marginalised perspectives that exist beyond capitalist logic. Through collective and socially engaged artistic practices, she produces cross-media works and participatory spatial concepts. Goralski works with Adam Erdmann as the duo die Blaue Distanz. Together, they question normative categories and narratives, developing conceptual models and artistic formats that highlight underrepresented and alternative perspectives.

Mahshid Mahboubifar works in a reflective manner, developing a narrative, poetic formal language. Her artistic practice is characterised by sensitive explorations of individual and collective narratives, memories and identities. Through the media of video, photography and performance, she reflects on her subjective perception and her connection to her immediate surroundings, whilst exploring processes of the production and preservation of memories. She develops her artistically reworked reconstructions of reality on the basis of research involving interviews and archive material.

Anna Perepechai works with images and text across multiple media. Alongside conceptual and documentary photography, her artistic practice is characterised by experimental, camera-less techniques. Biographically inspired texts and fragmentary artefacts expand and contextualise her photographic works. Her thematic focus lies on socio-political transformations, collective memory and transgenerational experiences, particularly in formerly Soviet societies. In a kind of narrative preservation of traces, she documents how traumatic events are inscribed in objects and in physical space.

Theresa Rothe works with sculpture and spatial installations, employing a symbolic, pictorial language. The starting point for her artistic practice is dream images, fantasies and inner states that elude unambiguous expression. In her exploration of the unconscious, she reflects on the tensions between dream and reality, interior and exterior, and playfulness and the grotesque. In doing so, she combines sculptural, installation-based, material-related and kinetic elements to create atmospheric spaces of experience in which ambivalence, emotional complexity and the hidden become tangible.

The works selected for the exhibition by Franzi Goralski, Mahshid Mahboubifar, Anna Perepechai and Theresa Rothe differ significantly in both their thematic focus and choice of media. Through large-scale installations and cohesive groups of works reflecting personal experiences and social interconnections, themes such as war and political violence, fragmented identities, trauma and memory, and queer realities are explored. Through large-scale installations and cohesive groups of works that reflect personal experiences and social interconnections, themes such as war and political violence, fragmented identities, trauma and memory, as well as queer realities of life, are explored. In their diversity, the four artists’ works coalesce into a multi-layered and thought-provoking presentation of contemporary artistic practice and key contemporary discourses.