Jack Galef Visual Arts Award
Image: Catherine Telford Keogh, Carriers (Gravity-Fed), 2024. Installation view, GTA24 at MOCA Toronto, 2024. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Helena Anrather Gallery (New York). Photo: LF Documentation.
ART
Catherine Telford Keogh
Jack Galef Visual Arts Award
The Guggenheim New York announced Catherine Telford Keogh as the inaugural recipient of the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award, a new biennial honor recognizing outstanding achievement and originality in contemporary visual art. Catherine Telford Keogh (b. 1986, Toronto, Canada) is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist who works with sculpture, installation, and contingent materials. Following material and conceptual encounters that generate curiosity and a sense of unknowing, Telford Keogh examines how matter is held, crushed, preserved, and dissolved within systems of extraction and circulation that structure contemporary life—binding geology, infrastructure, commodity culture, and living bodies across otherwise incompatible timescales.
About the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award
RIBA Asia Pacific Awards 2025
Image: College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Rui Xue Multi-Hall, Tongji University, Chengdu, China. Photo: Wongke.
ARCHITECTURE
RIBA Asia Pacific Awards
The first winners of the RIBA Asia Pacific Awards have been announced. As part of the expansion of the UK institution's International Awards, the organization is now highlighting two new territories: the Middle East and Asia Pacific. The inaugural RIBA Asia Pacific Awards and their ten categories were conceived to reward impactful, mindful architecture. Eight buildings share the top spot, ranging from sustainable mixed-use towers to masterplanning and housing.
About the RIBA Asia Pacific Awards
Sigg Prize 2025
Image: Exhibition views: Sigg Prize 2025, M+, Hong Kong (6 September 2025–4 January 2026). Courtesy M+. Wong Ping, Debts in the Wind (2025). Photo: Lok Cheng. Heidi Lau, Pavilion Procession (2025). Photo: Dan Leung.
ART
Wong Ping
Heidi Lau
Sigg Prize
For the first time since its inception, the Sigg Prize has been awarded to two recipients: Hong Kong-based artist Wong Ping (b. 1984) and Heidi Lau (b. 1987), who works in both New York and Macau. Wong’s winning workDebts in the Wind (2025), a staged large-scale video installation, was described by the jury as a ‘sophisticated blend of mesmerising visuals and dark humour that informs his acute observation and sensitivity to mundane life’. Macau-raised artist Heidi Lau presents an enigmatic ‘shrine’ composed of freestanding and suspended mint-green ceramic sculptures. Titled Pavilion Procession (2025), the work references Shanhaijing (山海经, The Classic of Mountains and Seas), the ancient compendium of mythical geographies, creatures and medicines. The jury called the work ‘both emotionally resonant and conceptually rigorous’, describing it as ‘compelling reflection on the human capacity to embrace sorrow and grief as a powerful source of creativity’.
Prix Mentor 2025
Image: © Paloma Laudet, Ejo series. Young people, all born after the genocide, dive into Lake Kivu from the ‘Island of Peace’. Rwanda, March 24, 2024.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Paloma Laudet
Prix Mentor
In 2015, the Freelens association launched the Prix Mentor, in partnership with La Scam* and CFPJ Médias, with the aim of providing photographers with the means to develop their projects. The 2025 award was presented to photographer Paloma Laudet for her series Ejo, on the reconstruction of Rwandan youth. On April 7, 1994, Rwanda, a small country in the heart of Africa's Great Lakes region, descended into utter horror. Thirty years later, a new generation is striving to build a future, torn between the weight of the past and an unwavering determination to move forward. Between memory and renewal, this project explores how young Rwandans are forging a shared identity and future in a region still deeply marked by the legacy of genocide.
BISO 2025
Image: Carla Gueye, Porosité(s), 2025. Photo: Carla Gueye.
ART
Clara Gueye
Grand Prix BISO
The Biennale Internationale de Sculpture de Ouagadougou held its fourth edition, contributing to the promotion of pan-African art scenes. At the end of a four-week creative residency, French-Senegalese multidisciplinary artist Clara Gueye won the Grand Prix BISO 2025 for her work entitled Porosité(s), which explores the female body as a sensitive territory, traversed by tensions and metamorphoses. A 2022 graduate of the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC), the 29-year-old artist participated in this year's 36th São Paulo Biennial.
Bourse du Talent SAIF 2025
Image: © Sasha Mongin, Le mourant qui ne mourrait pas series.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Sasha Mongin
Bourse du Talent SAIF
Sasha Mongin is the winner of the Bourse du Talent SAIF 2025 for her project Le mourant qui ne mourrait pas [The dying man who would not die]. With her deeply personal series, Sasha Mongin immerses us in the intimacy of her family history, closely linked to the contaminated blood scandal. The images express the vision of a child who lived for years in the certainty that her father would soon die. Sasha Mongin illustrates her most vivid memories through her images. While the subject is treated alternately in a metaphorical or very explicit manner, the images are all imbued with the artist's dreamlike and fantastical universe.
About the Bourse du Talent SAIF
High Line Plinth Commission
Image: Rendering, Tuan Andrew Nguyen's Plinth Commission, The Light That Shines Through the Universe. © Tuan Andrew Nguyen/The High Line.
ART
Tuan Andrew Nguyen
High Line Plinth Commission
The High Line announced the selection of the next Plinth commission, The Light That Shines Through the Universe—an awe-inspiring, 27-foot-tall sculpture from Vietnamese-American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen to be installed in spring 2026. Paying homage to the 6th-century Bamiyan Buddhas of central Afghanistan, Nguyen reimagines one of the two colossal statues that were tragically destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban in an act of iconoclasm. Nguyen presents his Plinth commission as a monument to cultural loss and enduring spirit. The work’s title directly references the affectionate nickname local communities used for the larger of the Bamiyan Buddhas: ‘Salsal,’ which translates to ‘the light shines through the universe.’ The work is not an exact replica of Salsal, but rather an echo, intended to invoke the memory of these lost cultural treasures.
About the High Line Plinth Commission
PhMuseum 2025 Women Photographers Grant
Image: © Verdiana Albano, I Ain't From No East Coast series.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Verdiana Albano
1st Prize
The PhMuseum 2025 Women Photographers Grant Main Prize has been awarded to German-Angolan photographer Verdiana Albano for her project I Ain't From No East Coast. Judge Katy Hundertmark motivates the choice on behalf of the jury: “In her layered and multi-dimensional project I Ain’t From No East Coast Verdiana Albano moves through the remnants of East Germany as if sifting through a family attic – lifting files and photographs, as well as furniture. Her work investigates the architecture of a childhood shaped by a white mother, a Black father, and a system already cracking at its seams. Between the posed and the documentary, she threads her own image alongside institutional archives, reminding us that the personal is always political. What emerges is a quiet insistence that identity is not inherited whole, but assembled – piece by piece – across time, place, and possibility.”
About the PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant
RIAS Andrew Doolan Award 2025
Image: Stallan-Brand and LDA Design, Union Terrace Gardens, Aberdeen, Scotland. Photo: Andrew Lee.
ARCHITECTURE
Union Terrace Gardens
RIAS Andrew Doolan Award
The Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland has named a public park, renewed by studios Stallan-Brand and LDA Design, as the winner of the Andrew Doolan Best Building in Scotland Award for 2025. Named Union Terrace Gardens, the project was praised for transforming the neglected Victorian garden in Aberdeen into a "safe, people-centred and accessible public realm" for the city. Stallan-Brand and LDA Design reinvigorated the park by introducing three pavilions, a cafe, a restaurant and a wine bar.
