HfK-Meisterschülerin (master student) Yuliya Tsviatkova awarded Karin Hollweg Pize 2025

The video installation In the animal’s skin by Yuliya Tsviatkova has been awarded the prestigious Karin Hollweg Prize. The winning work forms part of this year’s Meisterschüler:innen exhibition what is that invisible thing your arm is resting on, on view at the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art from 28 June to 10 August 2025.

The exhibition features exclusively new works by twelve artists. On display is a diverse spectrum of time-based art forms and installation works that combine multiple media. Space and society are not regarded as mere backdrops, but as active sites of engagement with questions of perception, grounding, and orientation.

The exhibition was curated by Julian Lautenbach.

The Karin Hollweg Prize is among the most prestigious and generously funded awards at German art academies. Since 2007, it has been awarded annually to an outstanding artistic position as part of the master’s student exhibition at Bremen University of the Arts – thanks to the generous support of the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation.

The prize carries a total endowment of €18,000. Half of this amount is awarded directly to the winner as prize money, while the other half is allocated to the realisation of a solo exhibition, planned in collaboration with a partner institution. In addition, the exhibition venue hosting the Meisterschüler:innen show receives a further €2,000 in funding.

The award ceremony took place on Thursday, 3 July, at the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art. It was opened by Janneke de Vries, director of the museum, who highlighted the high quality of the works on display and the relevance of the exhibition in her speech. She stressed the importance of the museum’s third floor – the so-called “fillet piece” – being occupied this year by twelve strong artistic positions, realising an exhibition that is both formally and conceptually dense. In relation to the Karin Hollweg Prize, she pointed out that it stands out not only because of its financial endowment, but above all due to its long-term support for emerging artists, who benefit from professional exhibition contexts and structural networking within the art world.

In his speech, Prof. Ingo Vetter, HfK Professor of Sculpture with Classical Materials, underlined the special significance of the exhibition for those involved. For many of the master’s students, it marked their first institutional group exhibition under professional conditions – a “reality check”, as Vetter put it. Studying at the HfK is geared towards developing an independent artistic stance – and this exhibition represents the first manifestation of how these stances interact with an exhibition venue, a curator, and an audience. He was so impressed by the quality and depth of the works that he has already visited the exhibition several times – discovering new connections, tensions, and references between the pieces on each tour.

The official highlight was the reading of the jury’s statement by David Bartusch, Chair of the Friends of the University of the Arts Bremen. In his speech, he announced the jury’s decision: This year’s winner of the Karin Hollweg Prize is Yuliya Tsviatkova with her video installation In the animal’s skin.

The film centres on the Białowieża Forest, located on the Belarusian-Polish border, an ecologically protected area that has become a site of political control and isolation due to the construction of a fortified border fence. The film follows the traces of the invisible: refugees who took this route and died in the forest. In the nearby Tatar village of Bohoniki, the local community buries these individuals. Silent gestures of care that starkly contrast with the political neglect and hostility.

The artist does not regard nature as merely a backdrop, but as an autonomous subject – with its own language, history, and resilience. This perspective is also reflected in In the animal’s skin: “Nature is always politically influenced,” she says. Her approach resists simplistic patterns of interpretation. Instead, she seeks a narrative form that includes both human and non-human actors.

The starting point for the work was the humanitarian crisis at the Belarusian-Polish border, and the question of how the complex and often overlapping perspectives of people, animals, and landscapes can be brought together. A key moment was a dream in which she turned into an animal, crossed the border, and met her grandmother. This dream image became the metaphorical basis for the film’s narrative – a form of storytelling beyond linear logic, in which “people, animals, forests, the living and the dead” can encounter one another.

Personal experiences inevitably flow into her work. Since the political repression following the 2020 protests, the artist has been unable to return to Belarus. In her speech at the award ceremony, she highlighted the fragility of language and hearing and the fact that democratic freedoms can erode even in seemingly stable societies. In the Animal’s Skin is therefore also a critical reflection on the relationship between power, visibility, and empathy and a plea for attentive, cross-border storytelling.

Her video installation In the animal's skin impressively combines politics with poetry and won over the jury with a subtle composition and the great precision in the interplay of images, sounds, and texts. The work addresses the fence erected by Poland along the border with Belarus. It is intended to block migrants from reaching Europe and runs right through the Białowieża Forest. The border fence also represents a barrier to all other forms of life and the artist interweaves this fact with a subliminally told personal story. Over the running time of 14 minutes, every sequence in the video, no matter how brief, is resolved, creating a great sense of tension despite the short duration of the work. The artist placed a schematic representation of the old growth forest on the floor beneath the projection screen. The fence stands out in it and the video depicts the monster that has been erected there without drama.

The jury 2022 included: Wolfgang Hainke (Artist, Bremen), Dr. Andreas Kreul (Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation), Prof. Dr. Christoph Grunenberg (Director Kunsthalle Bremen), Ingo Clauß  (Curator Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst), Dr. Arie Hartog (Director Gerhard Marcks Haus), Ingmar Lähnemann (Head Städtische Galerie Bremen), Dr. Frank Schmidt (Director Museen Böttcherstraße), Dr. Matilda Felix (Head Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst), Marie Oucherif (Artistic Director Künstler:innenhaus Bremen).

Assessor: David Bartusch, Chairman of the Friends of the University of the Arts Bremen e. V. and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Professor at the University of the Arts Bremen.

Yuliya Tsviatkova, born in Belarus in 1993, currently lives and works in Bremen. In 2015, she obtained her diploma in Biology from Mogilev State University A.A. Kuleshov (Belarus). She subsequently began a Master's degree in Marine Biology at the University of Bremen, before switching to the Fine Arts programme at the University of the Arts Bremen in 2018. In 2024, she received her diploma in the class of Prof. Dr Rosa Barba, which was later taken over by James Richards. She also completed her Meisterschüler:innen programme under his supervision.

A co-operation between the University of the Arts Bremen and Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst

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