Künstlerhof Frohnau is delighted to announce that Nafis Fathollahzadeh is the recipient of the Dieter Ruckhaberle Award 2023/24.

Jury statement: “We are pleased to offer time and space for the photographer and filmmaker’s collaboration with anthropologist Şermin Güven to further develop their joint film project Khabur. Fathollahzadeh and Güven engage photography, archaeology and mapping as disciplines that have emerged from the colonial-imperial enterprise. Through this project, they reflect on the imperial grammar of photographic archives and explore how these can be recycled, unlearned, and reimagined. We are looking forward to the expanded presentation of Fathollahzadeh’s cinematic approach in the context of their first solo exhibition in Berlin, in 2024.”

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 art director and co-editor of Momentography of a Failure, a multidisciplinary platform for collaborative thinking, collaborations, mapping and publishing. Fathollahzadeh was a fellow in the Rosa Luxemburg scholarly program on Authoritarianism and Counter strategies and affiliated with EUME: Forum Transregionale Studien. They were awarded the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Fotografie prize for their project Momentography of a Failure and received the DAAD International Scholarship for Artists.

The Dieter Ruckhaberle Award is dedicated to artists who in their work find innovative forms for addressing political subject matter. It has been initiated in 2019 by Künstlerhof Frohnau’s director Kaya Behkalam, in cooperation with the department of Art & History of the Berlin-Reinickendorf municipality.

This year’s jury members have been Pauline Doutreluingne, curator, film maker, artistic director of Kunstverein Arnsberg; Rike Frank, co-director European Kunsthalle and executive director Berlin Artistic Research Grant Program, Boaz Levin, author,  curator, co-editor of Cabinet Magazine’s Kiosk; Setareh Shahbazi, Artist, KHF Berlin, Dr. Sabine Ziegenrücker, Director of Museum Reinickendorf.

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, Annette Frick.