Memoria 2020: When Memories Are No Longer Enough reflects on DIVA’s identity as a Black French woman in New Orleans through the lens of another diasporic experience: a Mardi Gras Indian Queen. The Mardi Gras Indian tradition is believed to originate from encounters between Native and Black communities in the late 19th century. The work explores artistic archives, cultural memory, and testimony.
2026 | Main Prize Winner
Felipe Castelblanco is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and filmmaker working at the intersection of participatory, film, and Media Art. Tunda: A Quantic Plant and the Devil’s Breath is a multi-channel video that explores the entangled histories of plants and colonial extraction. The work combines science, ethnomedicine, and ecology, encouraging us to question how we see things.
2025 | Emerging Prize Winner
Porosity reflects Sam Metz’s sensory experience of the Humber Estuary. Bright yellow structures echo how they see the water’s reflection through ocular albinism (a condition that affects the eyes). These modular sculptures centre embodied interaction, inviting viewers to explore through movement and touch. Metz, a neurodivergent artist, uses sculpture as a way to communicate non-verbally.
2025 | Main Prize Winner
Tobi Onabolu is an artist-filmmaker and writer from London, now based in Grand Popo, Benin Republic. Danse Macabre explores spirituality, mental health and the human psyche through Jungian psychology, Yoruba cosmology and dance. It combines poetry, music, archival audio and movement to represent the conscious and unconscious mind. Dancers, singers and unseen voices animate this portrait of healing.
2024 | Emerging Prize Winner
In 2018, an incel (involuntary celibate) called Anathematic Anarchist posted a suicide letter on Reddit entitled “America is responsible for my death.” The Mechanics of Fluids is an attempt to find answers to his words. It is a virtual drift through the internet in search of his digital trace, resulting in a journey that draws upon similarities between shared isolation and solitude in a digital world.
2024 | Main Prize Winner
Nazarbazi [the play of glances] explores love and desire in Iranian cinema, where depictions of intimacy between women and men are prohibited. Working between cinema and live performance, Tafakory uses images, words and feelings to make textual and filmic collages that stitch together poetry, documentary and archival material. Her work observes regulatory forces in post-revolution Iranian cinema.
2023 | Emerging Prize Winner
Hope Strickland’s piece was filmed in archives and museums across the UK. I’ll Be Back looks at collections that hold objects of colonial violence. It examines institutional practices and reconsiders the distance between myth, history and systemic power. Amongst these is a book containing a diagram of a slave ship, a key document in the abolitionist movement, and insects gathered in Sierra Leone.
2023 | Main Prize Winner
Larry Achiampong’s Wayfinder won the 2023 prize. The film follows a young girl’s journey across England. Travelling from North to South, she passes through different regions, towns and landscapes, encountering people, stories and situations on her way. This epic film builds a dialogue about class and economic exclusion, belonging and displacement, cultural heritage and the meaning of home.
2022 | Emerging Prize Winner
Yukako Tanaka’s multidisciplinary work focuses on the notion of “existing” and “absence.” Her research fuses art, science and philosophy, reflecting on the accelerated transition of human condition in a new era, which can be defined as posthuman / transhuman, where human realities are a hybrid generation of physical and virtual experiences. The winning work is titled Recalling The Future.
2022 | Main Prize Winner
Baff Akoto’s Leave The Edges is an immersive dreamscape that explores the complex ancestries of African diasporic cultural expression. Rather than relying on formal narrative, the work took the artist through Europe and the Caribbean to consider historical legacies and societal politics through the language of movement, which gently draws connections across ancestries, borders and cultures.
2021 | Main Prize Winner
In Above Us Only Sky, a narrator leads us into a magical-realist history that is bereft of fabrication that begins with an investigation into a plane crash in communist Czechoslovakia, where one woman has survived. He has exhibited internationally in Vienna, Vancouver and Berlin. He has participated in exhibitions such as the Biennale of Busan and in the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
2021 | Emerging Prize Winner
Kasumu questions the production of identity as it relates to her own personal affiliations with the complex ways in which the past and present remain in constant dialogue. Kasumu has exhibited work at the V&A, London; Getty Images Gallery, London; and Contemporary Arts Center. She is the recipient of BlackStar’s Audience Award for Best Short Documentary 2021.
2020 | Main Prize Winner
Storr’s work is concerned with the ability to speak about black and mixed-race identities. Carnival has provided ground to consider cultural representation. Her work has screened at Open City Documentary Film Festival, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; London Short Film Festival and Whitechapel Gallery, London. She featured in The Guardian and Somerset House’s podcast.
2020 | Emerging Prize Winner
Counterfictions weaves together information from scientific facts and quotes from former US president, Donald Trump. In 2020 Yuan took part in an OCAT Institute Research-based Project. Yuan has shown work at London’s Somerset House; London Zoo; London Design Biennale and Venice Architecture Biennale. He was awarded a Film London FLAMIN Fellowship in 2021.
2019 | Main Prize Winner
Rebirth Is Necessary is the summation of Nkiru’s loaded feelings and questions about black people, the black experience and the idea of black universality. The film also won Best Documentary at the London Independent Film Festival and introduced Black Panther at its London premiere. Her music video for Beyoncé won a Grammy for Best Music Video. She was shortlisted for a Jarman Award in 2020.
2019 | Emerging Prize Winner
Tafakory explores the contradictory images of women and their portrayal through religion. I Have Sinned A Rapturous Sin is set against religious clerics instructing women to suppress their sexual desires. She was nominated for Tiger Award and Found Footage Award at 47th IFFR, Best Short Award at 67th MIFF. She won Best Short Film at Documenta Madrid. Her work has exhibited at Videonale.
2018 | Main Prize Winner
Birkin’s work reflects on the way war is depicted. At its core is a concern for censorship and the edges of visibility, often focusing on omissions and redactions. Profiles addresses the relationship between spectacle and loss, specifically, the representation of civilian casualties from the Iraq War. Birkin has exhibited work at Saatchi Gallery, London and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
2018 | Emerging Prize Winner
Inspired by painting and the visual power of cinema, Electra Lyhne-Gold stages herself in surreal, fictional narratives, inhabiting invented personas or characters. After winning she began working on a series of performances and photographs captured on a recent visit to Italy. The photography was shown at The ING Discerning Eye exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London.
2017 | Main Prize Winner
Everyday electronic objects assume new roles in the installations of Adam Basanta, taking on sculptural forms. In Curtain (white) the ubiquitous white earbud headphones become a three metre-long array, generating white noise patterns. Basanta was a longliste for the Sobey Art Award, Canada. He was the winner of the Prix Pierre Ayot 2019. He has exhibited work in the National Art Centre, Tokyo.
2017 | Emerging Prize Winner
Tafakory is interested in womanhood and rites of passage, drawing on the notion of the personal as political. In Absent Wound, the physical strength of wrestling is contrasted with the protagonist facing her menstrual cycle. She has exhibited internationally including, Melbourne MIFF; ICA London; Barbican Cinema London; Whitechapel Gallery and Anthology Film Archives.
2016 | Main Prize Winner
This Much I’m Worth is a self-evaluating artwork that continually displays its own sale value. The work sources its value from the internet. It seeks to question the values we place on objects and people. Ara has exhibited work at The Barbican, Whitechapel Gallery and the V&A where she undertook a residency. She won the inaugural CoLAB commission for Sculpture: Women Make Sculpture, 2019.
2016 | Emerging Prize Winner
The Austrian audio installation artist created TIME TO X which transforms the fourth dimension, time, into a geometrical expanse. A short audio file is sliced into short fragments, mapped on a horizontal array of 96 loudspeakers and played back simultaneously so every acoustic element of the sound is continuously audible. Hochgatterer studied Art and Design at Linz and previously worked at the Linz Opera House.
2015| Main Prize Winner
Keane’s paintings draw on images from the great Stalinist terror of the 1930s. They are sourced from mug shots of arrested victims at a time when no-one was safe from accusation of sabotage, betrayal or political deviation. Keane has exhibited work at The Imperial War Museum, London; Royal Summer Exhibition, London; Manchester Art Gallery and Flowers Gallery, New York.
2015 | Emerging Prize Winner
For 10 years, Mooney has observed and experimented with landscape, from the scenery of her home country, Ireland, to less familiar terrains. Come away, O’… is part of a larger body of work which explores the importance of the act of viewing Tokyo from above. Mooney’s work has featured on BBC Radio 3 and she has received funding from the Arts Council Ireland.
2014 | Main Prize Winner
Aiming to investigate the relationship between humans and nature, Song for the Last Queen refers to the endangerment of bees. As a species that plays a vital role in maintaining the earth’s ecosystem, Neumeyer addresses the phenomena found in science, culture and the natural world. Her 2019 projects were supported by Wellcome Trust as part of Contagious Cities, Berlin.
2014 | Emerging Prize Winner
Lewar’s work explores the possibilities of cross-disciplinary art objects, drawing on examples from the 21st Century. The piece acknowledges the visual appeal of musical instruments and abstract geometric sculptural practice. Lewar’s work spans across sculpture, installation and illustration. She is a commissioned artist for the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall.
2013 | Main Prize Winner
The photographic series investigates masculinity through traditional work roles. The works portray an individual crossing a threshold. O’Mara was shortlisted for the International Emerging Artist Award, Show At The Fair Award 2016, Dubai. His permanent collection is in Gold Coast City Art Gallery. Works have featured in The Sunday Mail, Art Guide Australia and BBC News Online.
2013 | Emerging Prize Winner
Whatmore portrays the flaws and failures of the human condition and personal relationships in her work. The Family Meal is a consolidation of disfigured and reconfigured objects composed in a skeletal and structured kitchen/living room space. Whatmore was commended in 2015 by Royal British Sculptors. She has exhibited at the London Art Fair and has had work chosen by Saatchi Gallery.
2013 | People’s Choice Winner
Heavily influenced by childhood, the work focuses on certain customs that have been handed down since ancient times. Park’s practice is particularly focused upon that which is invisible and the use of transformed and abandoned objects, concentrating on deconstructing value systems, personal histories and culture, commenting on narrative structures.
