Prix Reiffers Art Initiatives 2025
Image: Exhibition view, Anhar Salem, 1000 milliards d’images, Reiffers Art Center, Paris.
ART
Anhar Salem
Prix Reiffers Art Initiatives
For this fourth edition, Reiffers Art Initiatives has rewarded the artist Anhar Salem, whose works are on show until 10 May as part of the group exhibition 1000 milliards d’images, curated by Thibaut Wychowanok. Born in 1993 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Anhar Salem draws on her personal experience of social networks and the flow of images available on the net to explore issues such as self-representation and the virtual extension of our lives on networks. For her, reality and the digital world merge to form a single hybrid universe. She is also interested in the ways in which we socialise on networks, as well as the images that circulate on them, informing us and conditioning our perception and our collective imagery.
About the Prix Reiffers Art Initiatives
2025 International Sculpture Center Award
Image: Albert Paley, Envious Composure, 2012, Park Avenue, New York, NY, 2013. Jaume Plensa, Istanbul Blues, 2012, FIAC 2012, Place Vendôme, Paris, France.
ART
Albert Paley
Jaume Plensa
Lifetime Achievement Award
Albert Paley and Jaume Plensa received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center. Albert Paley, an active artist for over 40 years at his studio in Rochester, New York, is the first metal sculptor to have received the coveted Institute Honors from the American Institute of Architects, the AIA's highest distinction awarded to a non-architect. Jaume Plensa is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading contemporary sculptors. Over the past 35 years, he has created sculptures and installations that unify individuals through connections of spirituality, the body and collective memory.
About the Lifetime Achievement Award
2025 Sony World Photography Awards
Image: Zed Nelson, Shanghai Wild Animal Park, Shanghai, China, The Anthropocene Illusion series. © Zed Nelson
PHOTOGRAPHY
Zed Nelson
Photographer of the Year
At the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards, Zed Nelson was awarded the title of Photographer of the Year for his series The Anthropocene Illusion. Shot over six years across four continents, the series is a disturbing insight into a world in which the natural world is replaced by spectacle. "So, while we devastate the world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature – a reassuring spectacle, an illusion," Zed Nelson says of the work.
About the Sony World Photography Awards
2025 World Press Photo
Image: Samar Abu Elouf, Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged Nine, Palestine, for The New York Times.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Samar Abu Elouf
Photo of the Year
Palestinian photojournalist Samar Abu Elouf received the 2025’s World Press Photo of the Year award for her image of a Gazan boy called Mahmoud Ajjour, then age nine and now ten, who lost both his arms in an Israeli attack on Gaza a little over a year ago. When she took the picture, Abu Elouf says, she was thinking of her own four children, the youngest of whom is 12. "When I see Mahmoud, I think of him as if he was my own son," she says. Abu Elouf is from Gaza herself: like many of the subjects of her photography, she was evacuated from the territory, and now lives in the same compound in Doha where Mahmoud lives with his family.
Liberty Art Award 2025
Image: Zoé Bernardi, À l’aube, Mon Héritage series, 2024, silver photograph, 80 x 80 cm. © Zoé Bernardi
PHOTOGRAPHY
Zoé Bernardi
Liberty Art Award
Zoé Bernardi is the winner of the Liberty Art Award 2025. A young graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she stood out from around forty entries on the theme of heritage. Her photograph À l'aube [At dawn](2024) is part of a series that began during the first confinement, in which the artist photographed members of her family, in particular "my father, an old hippie, my mother, an old punk, my stepfather, an old prolo and my grandmother, a little old lady with pink hair. For 5 years I've been celebrating the love that holds our patched-up family together," she confides.
2025 Guggenheim Fellowships
Image: Installation view, Farah Al Qasimi, Star Machine, 2023, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
ART
Guggenheim Fellowships
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced the 198 scholars and artists who received a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships, making up the 100th class of fellows. The awardees span 53 disciplines divided into four categories of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and creative arts, and have created projects that "directly respond to timely themes and issues such as climate change, Indigenous studies, identity, democracy and politics, incarceration, and the evolving purpose of community," per the announcement. Among the winners in the fine arts category are Theaster Gates, Raul Guerrero, Julie Tolentino, Ulrike Mueller, Denis Defibaugh, Sara Cwynar and Farah Al Qasimi.
About the Guggenheim Fellowships
Fuorisalone Award 2025
Image: Marc-Antoine Barrois, MISSION ALDEBARAN installation, designed by Antoine Bouillot, Milan Design Week 2025.
DESIGN
MISSION ALDEBARAN
Best Installation
At Milan Design Week 2025, Parisian couturier Marc-Antoine Barrois presented his new fragrance ALDEBARAN with a large-scale installation designed by French designer Antoine Bouillot, which won the prize for best installation at the Fuorisalone Award 2025. Grounded by the fragrance, the installation combines olfactory art and experiential design to immerse visitors in Barrois and Bouillot’s interpretation of optimism and hope amidst challenging times.
