Between memory and imagination: the past as an unstable construct

The 49th Bremen Prize for Fine Arts goes to HfK alumnus Armando Duçellari. It is one of the oldest and most lucrative prizes for young artists in Germany and has been awarded since 1977. Armando Duçellari receives the award, which is endowed with 6,000 euros and presented by the Senator for Culture, for his work “Overlapping Remnants.” In addition, he will receive a grant of €3,000 for a solo catalog and a solo exhibition at the Städtische Galerie Bremen. The works of all applicants will be on display there until April 26, 2026.

For this exhibition, regional art experts serving as a selection committee chose several promising artistic positions from 37 submissions. This year, in addition to Duçellari, these are ten artists: former HfK master students Franca Brockmann, Isidora Bruna, Marei Dierßen, Eghbal Joudi, Harumi Miyato, Candan Öztürk, Martin Reichmann, and Leon Sahiti, as well as HfK alumni Mona Charaf Eddine and Mohar Kalra. A national jury selected the winner from the exhibition of their works. This year's jury included artist Jens Brand (professor of sound in the visual arts at the Braunschweig University of Art), Stefan Gronert (Sprengel Museum Hannover), Anna Nowak (Kunsthaus Hamburg), Katharina Rüppell (Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle), and Junia Thiede (Kunstverein Braunschweig).

This newspaper article provides background information on Duçellari's “Overlapping Remnants” from 2025. She explains why this work by the Albanian artist, born in 1990, particularly impressed the jury: "In the installation, Armando Duçellari combines a video filmed with a handheld camera with four floor plan drawings hung opposite each other. The video documents the artist and his aunt's joint visit to the former villa of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha in Tirana, based on her memories. While she worked for Hoxha for several years, Armando Duçellari himself lived in the 3,400-square-meter building as part of an artist scholarship after it was carefully converted into artist residences in 2024 on the initiative of the French foundation Art Explora. Based on this multi-layered constellation, the work questions the constitution of memory from different temporal and political perspectives. In a formally convincing interplay of image, language, and graphic reworking of the floor plans, historical “realities” become tangible as unstable constructions. Memory does not appear as a fixed narrative, but as a process of subjective overwriting.

The work, which is clearly politically oriented in terms of content, is particularly impressive for its sophistication: it does not fall into simplistic interpretations of history, but rather presents history as an ongoing process of individual appropriation and reflection.

“However, other works have a more powerful political impact,” writes the Kreiszeitung newspaper, "such as those by Franca Brockmann, who has divided the large gallery space with a high fence and subtly criticizes a certain lifestyle in a poem. A lifestyle that remains stuck in the sunshine, drinking coffee and talking politics about the dissolution of borders, instead of taking concrete action. Brockmann bent the letters from wire taken from dismantled fences. The works of Candan Öztürk, who paints on cotton, then shreds it and reassembles it on a second piece of fabric, are also strong in aesthetics and statement. The motifs—houses that have been the target of racist arson attacks, the first victim of the NSU, a deportation plane—give the descriptive term “fragments of memory” its ambiguity. 

What is striking this year is the high proportion of painterly approaches – alongside Öztürk, Isidora Bruna, Marei Dierßen, Eghbal Joudi, and Harumi Miyato present themselves in this genre in very different ways. Isidora Bruna combines politics with the question of our transience. Eghbal Joudi translates his canvases into a spatial installation: charcoal drawings of details from a 1951 photo of the Persian Shah, whose son is currently claiming political power for Iran, can be experienced plastically in space. 

“Harumi Miyato's extremely appealing still lifes are based on images from interior design catalogs, which she removes and copies using a special process. She uses shifts and overpainting to question the supposed perfection of the lifestyle depicted in the interior design,” according to the Kreiszeitung newspaper. And further: "In Marei Dierßen's work, it is perspective and art-historical references that characterize the interiors she paints. The rooms, deliberately kept free of people, nevertheless reveal a great deal about their inhabitants by telling of their personalities through objects and pictures. What we bring from the world into our little world, our home, is what interests Dierßen. With the help of perspective, the artist allows viewers to dive deep into the rooms from below."

Martin Reichmann also displays a heavy concrete block with handprints on it, which appears to float lightly in the room. Mohar Kalra transfers his encounters with crows at Werdersee from public space into an independent art installation. In this work, he incorporates contemporary phenomena of a mediatized society. Leon Sahiti also analyzes the ultimately political impetus of digitality in a video work and a sculpture.
 

Armando Duçellari studied multimedia arts at the Università Iuav di Venezia (Italy) from 2008 to 2015, fine arts at the HfK Bremen from 2016 to 2019, and participated in the UNIDEE residency program “Cittadellarte” in Biella (Italy) and “Art House Shkodër” (Albania) in 2017. In 2018, he worked as a DAAD-ISAP scholarship holder at the University of Guelph (Canada) and was a master student at the HfK under Prof. Heike Kati Barath from 2020 to 2022. This was followed in 2022 by the “Cité Internationale des Arts” scholarship in Paris (France), a scholarship from the Kunstfonds Foundation in 2024, and the Tirana Art Residency (Albania) in 2025.