Hasselblad Award 2025
Image: Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #20, 1992. © Sophie Ristelhueber/Adagp, Paris 2025
PHOTOGRAPHY
Sophie Ristelhueber
Hasselblad Award
Sophie Ristelhueber is the winner of the Hasselblad Award 2025. Sophie Ristelhueber was born in 1949 in Paris, where she still lives and works. Places marked by conflict often make up the core of her work. Avoiding the sensational, she instead captures an emotional intensity in the silent, enduring traces of human presence and activity. A recurring theme in her artistic practice is humanity’s perpetual cycle of creation and destruction, followed by renewal. The photographs in Sophie Ristelhueber’s series are meticulously selected fragments of a larger narrative, where the viewer is invited to create the story.
Biennale Architettura 2025
Image: Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Italian Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai, © Michele Nastasi. Museum of Novecento at Piazza del Duomo, Milano. Feeling the Energy Park, Carlo Ratti Associati + Italo Rota, Milan Design Week 2022, © Marco Beck Peccoz.
ARCHITECTURE
Italo Rota
Special Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Memoriam
Italian architect and designer Italo Rota (1953 – 2024) has been awarded the Special Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Memoriam of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia - Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. For over thirty years Italo Rota's work was centred on constant and advanced cross-disciplinary research, from contemporary art to robotics, to develop innovative projects in which humanistic beauty and sustainability became integral and disruptive elements.
The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement has been awarded to the American philosopher Donna Haraway. On the decision, Carlo Ratti stated: "Donna Haraway is one of the most influential voices in contemporary thought, straddling the social sciences, anthropology, feminist criticism, and the philosophy of technology."
Image: Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain. Photo by Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy of 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.
ARCHITECTURE
Kingdom of Bahrain
Heatwave
Golden Lion for Best National Participation
The Kingdom of Bahrain's pavilion curated by architect Andrea Faraguna won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the Biennale Architettura 2025. NamedHeatwave, the pavilion stands out for addressing the pressing issue of extreme heat by showcasing passive cooling strategies using geothermal wells and solar chimneys connected via a thermo-hygrometric axis, which links underground conditions to outdoor air. The modular structure features a floor and cantilevered ceiling supported by a central column, adaptable for various urban environments.
Image: Canal Café. Photo by Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy of 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.
ARCHITECTURE
Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Canal Café
Golden Lion for Best Participation in the 19th Exhibition
Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.
The Golden Lion for Best Participation in the 19th Exhibition Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. was awarded to Canal Café, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Natural Systems Utilities, SODAI, Aaron Betsky and Davide Oldani. The installation is set up to use natural filtration systems to purify water from the city's canals and make it info coffee that visitors of the Arsenale can enjoy.
About the Biennale Architettura
2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Image: Liu Jiakun, West Village, 2015, Chengdu, People's Republic of China. Photo courtesy of Arch-Exist.
ARCHITECTURE
Liu Jiakun
Pritzker Architecture Prize
Liu Jiakun, of Chengdu, People’s Republic of China, is the 2025 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Intertwining seeming antipodes such as utopia versus everyday existence, history versus modernity, and collectivism versus individuality, Liu offers affirming architecture that celebrates the lives of ordinary citizens. "Architecture should reveal something—it should abstract, distill and make visible the inherent qualities of local people. It has the power to shape human behavior and create atmospheres, offering a sense of serenity and poetry, evoking compassion and mercy, and cultivating a sense of shared community," expresses Liu.
About the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Prix Marcel Duchamp 2025
Image: View of Xie Lei's installation for the exhibition of the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2025 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole.
ART
Xie Lei
Prix Marcel Duchamp
Xie Lei is the winner of the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2025. He has lived and worked in Paris since 2006 and is represented by Semiose gallery (Paris). In the collective exhibition for the prize, held at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the artist presents seven monumental canvases in shades of phosphorescent green, blurring the boundaries of reality and transforming gravity into a dreamlike experience. Xie Lei has perfected a style of painting that embraces ambiguity, in which the humans he depicts, whose features and gender are rarely identifiable, undeniably navigate between two worlds.
Turner Prize 2025
Image: Nnena Kalu. Exhibition view, Turner Prize 2025, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford,
27 September 2025 – 22 February 2026. Photo: David Levene.
ART
Nnena Kalu
Turner Prize
Nnena Kalu has won the Turner Prize 2025, presented in a ceremony in Bradford, this year’s UK City of Culture. The 59-year-old British Nigerian becomes the first artist with a learning disability to win the prize. Nnena Kalu creates hanging sculptures from wrappings of different materials making cocoon-like shapes, as well as large-scale drawings made with vigorous, rhythmic lines. The jury commended Kalu’s bold and compelling work, praising her lively translation of expressive gesture into captivating abstract sculpture and drawing. Noting her distinct practice and finesse of scale, composition and colour, they admired the powerful presence these works have.
RIBA Stirling Prize 2025
Image: Witherford Watson Mann Architects, Appleby Blue Almshouse, Bermondsey, London.
ARCHITECTURE
Appleby Blue Almshouse
RIBA Stirling Prize
The Appleby Blue Almshouse social housing complex in London, designed by local studio Witherford Watson Mann Architects, has won this year's RIBA Stirling Prize for the UK's best new building. Created on the site of an abandoned care home in Southwark, Appleby Blue Almshouse comprises 57 apartments for over-65s, organised around a central courtyard. "By creating a radical and significant model that embraces co-living at a time where our demographics are shifting, Appleby Blue sets an ambitious standard for social housing among older people." said this year's jury chair Ingrid Schroder, who is director of London's Architectural Association (AA).
Prix Pictet 2025
Image: Alfredo Jaar, from The End series, 2025.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Alfredo Jaar
Prix Pictet
Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar is the winner of Prix Pictet Storm, the 11thcycle of Prix Pictet. Jaar was recognised for his 2025 series The End, which focuses on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, described by scientists as an ‘environmental nuclear bomb’. The lake is a keystone ecosystem in the western hemisphere but is being destroyed by excessive water extraction. About his series, Jaar said: "My objective is to show the tragic fate of the lake and simultaneously reveal its extraordinary beauty and potential. In spite of the dire situation we are in, I wanted to create images of great beauty and sadness. In the face of the magnitude of this tragedy, I decided to print these images in a small, unspectacular format, as a kind of visual whisper, a lament for our dying planet."
2025 ANDAM Fashion Awards
Image: Meryll Rogge, Fall 2025 Fashion Show.
FASHION
Meryll Rogge
Grand Prize
Meryll Rogge received the Grand Prize at the 2025 ANDAM Fashion Awards. A Belgian-born designer and ANDAM finalist last year, Meryll Rogge was the first woman to be named Designer of the Year at the 2024 Belgian Fashion Awards and was a finalist in the 2025 Woolmark Prize. Having shown her collections in Paris since 2021, she held her first fashion show in March, presenting a collection she deemed her "most developed pieces". These were among the designs she showed to the ANDAM jury, who was impressed by her compelling artistic vision, her bold experimentation with shapes and patterns, and her remarkable talent for creating pieces that are both statement-making and wearable.
About the ANDAM Fashion Awards
Deutsche Börse Photography
Foundation Prize 2025
Image: Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Family group photo on a Christmas day, South Africa, Johannesburg, Thokoza, 2017. © Lindokuhle Sobekwa
PHOTOGRAPHY
Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize
Johannesburg-based artist Lindokuhle Sobekwa is the 29th recipient of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for his book I carry Her photo with Me. Deeply personal, the project began when Sobekwa found a family portrait with his older sister Ziyanda’s face cut out. When the siblings were seven and thirteen, she chased him and he was hit by a car and badly injured. She disappeared hours later, only returning a decade later, ill. By this time Sobekwa had become a photographer. He tried to take her portrait, but stopped when she reacted angrily. Ziyanda died soon after. Through this scrapbook-like publication, Sobekwa explores the memory of his sister and the wider implications of such disappearances – a troubling part of South Africa’s history.
About the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize
2025 LVMH Prize
Image: Soshiotsuki, Tokyo Spring 2026 Collection.
FASHION
Soshiotsuki
LVMH Prize for Young Designers
Soshiotsuki by Japanese designer Soshi Otsuki won the 2025 LVMH Prize for Young Designers. The brand is known for its voluminous 80s-inflected tailoring inspired by Japanese "salarymen." A graduate of Bunka Fashion College, Otsuki also attended Coconogacco, the private fashion school that is producing some of Japan’s most exciting new talents. Shortly after launching Soshiotsuki in 2015, he was short-listed for the 2016 LVMH Prize. Since then he has refined his signature blend of Japanese and Western menswear codes. Suit linings are slashed in reference to kimono sleeves, while some jackets are wrapped like karate uniforms. Steve O Smith and Torishéju won the runner-up Karl Lagerfeld and Savoir-Faire prizes, respectively.
