Bernd and Hilla Becher Award 2025
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg & Farah Al Qasimi
7.6. – 7.9.2025

The artists Ursula Schulz-Dornburg and Farah Al Qasimi will be honoured with the Bernd and Hilla Becher Award 2025. The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is extending the award with an exhibition of works by the award winners.

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg has been awarded the main award of the Bernd and Hilla Becher Award 2025. She was born in 1938 and has lived in Düsseldorf since 1969. Schulz-Dornburg pursues a cultural-historical anthropological interest in her work, which she describes as the ‘verticality of time’. In her photographs, she attempts to give found and formerly living things a conceptual and contemporary form, as well as to maintain an ongoing awareness of resources – in both human and nature-related ways.

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg studied photography and journalism in Munich from 1959 to 1960, whereupon she developed her own self-taught visual language.
She repeatedly travelled to countries such as Armenia, Kazakhstan, Yemen, Syria, Indonesia, Iraq, but also China, Nepal, Russia and Turkey. There she documented changes in the landscape and the decay of political systems. Schulz-Dornburg belongs to a generation of female photographers whose work has only been (re)discovered in German-speaking countries in recent years and has had international exhibitions in recent years, including at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris (2019/2020), the British Museum (2018), the Städel Museum in Frankfurt (2018) and the Tate Modern in London (2013 and 2014).

The promotional award goes to the artist Farah Al Qasimi, who was born in Abu Dhabi in 1991 and lives in New York. In her artistic work, she examines post-colonial structures of power, gender and taste in the Arab Gulf states.
Al Qasimi studied photography and music at Yale University in 2012 and received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2017. Splitting her time between Dubai and New York, social critique and observation of the multi-layered aspects of each place are indirectly integrated into her artistic practice. Through her bold and vibrant photographs, she explores the unspoken social norms and values embedded in a place, moment or object.
Farah Al Qasimi’s photographic, filmic and performative works create worlds that transcend boundaries of identities and question gender in the age of a global post-internet. Al Qasimi focuses her gaze on the banal in life and imbues it with a contemporary aesthetic.

The Bernd and Hilla Becher Award of the state capital Düsseldorf is awarded every two years. The award was named after Bernd and Hilla Becher in recognition of their artistic work and teaching. The artist couple supervised the first class for artistic photography at a German art academy at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and thus made an important contribution to the international recognition of photography as a medium in the visual arts.

The nomination and honouring of the Bernd and Hilla Becher Award is decided by an international jury. In addition to the Lord Mayor Dr Stephan Keller, the Councillor for Culture and Integration Miriam Koch and political representatives, the 2022-2025 jury includes the following expert jurors
Max Becher, son of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Düsseldorf/New York
Linda Conze, Head of the Photography Collection at the Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (as an advisory member of the jury)
Florian Ebner, Head of the Photography Department of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Dr Felix Krämer, General Director of the Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf
Ute Mahler, photographer and founder of the Ostkreuzschule, Berlin
Alona Pardo, Head of Programmes of the Arts Council Collection, UK, London

In its endeavours to present the honoured artistic positions to a broad public, the award will be expanded in the format of the Bernd and Hilla Becher Award Week to include an exhibition with works by the award winners, talks and film screenings. The participating institutions are the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Salon des Amateurs, the Kunstsammlung NRW – K21 and the Black Box cinema in the Film Museum. Admission to all events is free.

Responsible
Miriam Koch
Councillor, Department of Culture and Integration

Concept and project management
Stephan Macháč
Coordination Unit Photography, Cultural Office

Information about the Bernd and Hilla Becher Award: www.duesseldorf.de/fotografie/bernd-und-hilla-becher-preis