Contact Zones
SIMACEK AWARD 2025 WINNERS & NOMINEES
21 August - 26 September 2025
Arina Grinevich, Chorong Moon, Dalmonia Rognean, Duy Hung Ngo, Florian Nöthe, Katharina Maria Wimmer, Kweku Okokroko, Laura Josic, Leonie Holtkamp, Lisa Obereder, Lin Wolf, Lotti Brockmann, Ludwig Stalla, Olga Shcheblykina, Ömer Faruk Kaplan, Paria Shahrestani, Shuvo Rafiqul, Valentino Skarwan, Veronika Harb.
The concept of (social) Contact Zones refers to spaces in which different cultural practices, forms of knowledge, and modes of expression encounter one another—often accompanied by inequalities, shifts in power, and conflicts whose roots extend into colonial history.
Yet precisely because these dynamics are unavoidable, they also carry a responsibility: not to forget, but to consciously incorporate these tensions into the language of art. To take a step, to find a word, so that artistic voices can articulate and negotiate. In the context of art, Contact Zones therefore do not merely describe places of coexistence, but zones of exchange and productive friction, where materials, media, and attitudes meet and move together.
to unsettle one another,
where the necessity of meaning is not given,
but emerges in the process;
in the friction between individual language and collective presence.
as a complex constellation,
in which difference becomes visible.
In which art reconciles, and questions.
The invited artists, including the four award winners as well as the nominees of the SIMACEK AWARD 2025, engage with this present through diverse means: oil, acid, silk, concrete, plaster, performance, digital collage, or installation. The unity of form—at times fragile, at times charged—forms the bridge. A bridge across the currents through which the works flow. Beyond the medium, however, the artists are united by a shared urgency: reflecting on their own practice within a complex and condensed present. Their works negotiate not only form, but position. A language that states: I am, and asks: What am I here, with you, in this time?
The artists
Arina Grinevich (*2002, Belarus) explores themes such as migration, belonging, memory, and identity in her work.
Her long-term project Kalykhanka is based on the painterly processing of her dreams — a poetic archive of the unconscious where intimate inner worlds are transformed into atmospheric visual spaces. She connects personal narratives with social reflection. Her works navigate between delicacy and resistance, vulnerability and self-assertion.
Class for Experimental Art (Anna Jermolaewa)
University of Art and Design Linz (AT)
Chorong Moon’s (*1991, Seoul, South Korea) sculptures explore physical movement, bodily perception, and the interplay between the two as experienced in everyday life.
Various forces and motions—gravity, rotation, waves, resonance—act invisibly yet perceptibly all around us. Chorong observes and documents their trajectories, capturing moments of change and translating them into form. Her works arise from an aesthetic choice that awakens interest in physical phenomena and sensory experience.
Class of Florian Pumhösl
Academy of Fine Arts Munich (DE)
Dalmonia Rognean (*1993, Brașov, Romania) is an artist and photographer with a background in theater and film studies. Her practice is research-based and visually unfolds in a metaphysical, sometimes magically evocative imagery, while maintaining a connection to an empirical foundation.
Instead of linear narratives, Rognean creates visual spaces of possibility. Her works are rooted in the language of the real and simultaneously expand it toward visual worlds where multiple narrative layers coexist and intersect.
She is fascinated by everyday human habits and the peculiar beauty that emerges when mistakes, uncertainties, or fears are transformed into ritualized actions. Dalmonia’s works navigate the space between sensually perceptible reality and a realm beyond the visible and the sayable.
Class for Applied Photography and Time-Based Media (Maria Ziegelböck)
University of Applied Arts Vienna (AT)
Duy Hung Ngo works with memories that cannot be put into words. His videos and animations create a dialogue between image, material, and personal trace. It’s not about grand narratives, but subtle shifts—about what remains when an encounter, a moment, or an object echoes.
For the exhibition NO FISHING HERE LUFTMASSEN (December 2022), he treated 16mm film strips not in the traditional way, but as surfaces. Using stones, plant fragments, and acrylic paint, he scratched and marked the material. The resulting visual textures question rather than document: What is memory? And where does projection begin?
In summer 2023, he created a 3:54-minute animation fully modeled in Blender. The imagined world lies between cyberpunk and steampunk, serving as a stage for speculative storytelling and movements through imagined landscapes, populated by figures that are neither definitive nor complete.
Class for Experimental Art (Anna Jermolaewa)
University of Art and Design Linz (AT)
Florian Nöthe (*1995, Munich, Germany) works with collected and found objects whose traces of use become legible as carriers of both collective and individual memory. His artistic practice seeks modes of presentation that preserve the objects’ materiality and history while reframing them in new contexts. The growing collection functions as a three-dimensional sketchbook — an open archive in which the everyday is questioned, ordered, and re-staged.
A central motif in his work is the cage. Originally a symbol of control and domestication, it becomes an enclosed object itself. Encased in glass, its function is reversed: the focus shifts away from the interior toward the structure of the cage as a medium charged by museological contexts and practices of conservation. The glass enclosure signifies not only protection, but also distance. In this way, conventional modes of display are disrupted and societal notions of value and visibility are critically examined.
Class of Florian Pumhösl
Academy of Fine Arts Munich (DE)
Katharina Maria Wimmer (*2002, Salzburg) approaches her work with a sensitive awareness of materiality and meaning. She chooses tactile, often fragile materials such as lightweight aluminum foil, charcoal, and inkjet prints. Using a typewriter, she imprints selected words and phrases onto these surfaces, making language not only a message but literally inscribed into the material—turning the medium itself into a living trace of history and significance.
Her focus lies on the stories materials carry or absorb. Where are the traces of the past? Which narratives become visible through delicate engravings, which become tangible through texture? How do time, use, and history shape these objects, and how can they be rewritten or extended?
In her project Neutral Space, the deliberately placed, lime-covered floor squares serve as more than formal elements: they reference the common practice of staging exhibition spaces as neutral, history-free “white cubes”—places where art is isolated and considered autonomous. Wimmer reveals that this neutrality is a fiction, an empty space never truly separable from history, environment, and use.
Visual Arts with a focus on Photography (Lucie Stahl)
University of Art and Design Linz
Kweku Okokroko (*born 1999 in Accra, Ghana) works at the intersection of literature and visual arts. His works arise from a delicate interplay of text and image: paragraphs, lines, and stanzas meet lines, shapes, and figures, forming a layered and personal perspective on his environment.
At the core of his work are themes such as nature, tradition, identity, virtue, morality, and religion. He is particularly committed to preserving Ghanaian culture and counteracting its ongoing corruption and decay. The norms, traditions, and especially the rich oral literature of his country form the foundation of his art.
A significant part of his practice is based on the symbolism of animals as embedded in the oral literature of various Ghanaian tribes. Animals serve as carriers of virtues and values that represent human experiences and worldviews. For example, the Akɔmfem, the African guinea fowl, symbolizes community—a social, cohesive group—and is the subject of one of his paintings. The lion (Gyata), attributed with strength by the Fante people, also stands for central cultural virtues.
Kweku uses bold, colorful acrylic paints, mostly applied in flat areas on large canvases. His compositions are characterized by reduced, often monochrome backgrounds in natural tones, which give the animal motifs a special presence. In his latest works, he increasingly incorporates drawing as a medium to expand and deepen his artistic language.
Class: Drawing (Veronika Dirnhofer)
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT)
Laura Ana Josic (*born 2001, Vienna, AT) creates works that oscillate between childlike playfulness and complexity. Alongside small, plaster-made keepsakes, she also produces wall-mounted objects whose naive forms dissolve into intricate, nested structures. Familiar points of orientation blur: up and down, beginning and end enter a state of open ambivalence.
Painted surfaces and embedded symbols weave into a fluid fabric that resists any clear interpretation. Josic’s works feel both familiar and disorienting; they invite close observation and reflection without losing their playful lightness. In this way, they open a space where memory, perception, and imagination meet in multifaceted ways.
Site-specific Art (Paul Petritsch)
University of Applied Arts Vienna
The interplay between humans and the environment is central to Lin Wolf’s (*1998 in Vienna, AT) artistic work. Starting from places undergoing change—such as vacancy, restructuring, or conflicting interests—she develops observations that neither aim to be purely documentary nor objective. Rather, her focus lies on capturing atmosphere, traces, and shifts. Questions about the past, present, and possible future flow into her subjective image formations.
Her artistic responses often take shape on materials that have a concrete connection to the respective place, usually in the form of two-dimensional works. She does not see these as interventions but as comments that open new perspectives on seemingly familiar spaces. Without being didactic or explanatory, the works mark a pause—a quiet, precise form of attention.
Site-specific Art
University of Applied Arts Vienna (AT)
Leonie Holtkamp (*born 1999 in Dissen am Teutoburger Wald) lives and works in Vienna. Under the name hallohilfe, she develops objects positioned at the intersection of art and design. Often, two fundamentally different materials meet in her work, their tension forming the basis for sculptural furniture pieces. Her works oscillate between functional value and free form, between pragmatism and emotional charge. Time and again, they also explore the relationship between people, bodies, and spaces—in a subtle, often humorous way.
Class for Transmedia Art (Jakob Lena Knebl)
University of Applied Arts Vienna (AT)
Lisa Obereder (*1998 in Carinthia, AT) ) focuses in her painting practice on developing an abstract, gestural visual language shaped by intuition, perception, and subconscious impressions.
Obereder’s paintings emerge in the tension between spontaneous movement and prolonged, process-oriented layering. Some works grow over weeks and months through superimposed layers of paint, while others capture fleeting impulses—physical and immediate.
The starting point is often a personal observation, a conversation, a memory, or a melody—fragments that overlap, shift, disappear, or reappear during the creative process. The act of painting itself is never isolated but responds to spatial conditions, material, mood, and time. Especially through this open approach, extending beyond painting to drawing, music, or text, Obereder seeks an independent language that does not illustrate perception but makes it tangible, sensual, and freely accessible.
Art and Image | Figuration (with Kirsi Mikkola, Francis Ruyter, Alastair Mackinven)
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT)
Lotti Brockmann’s works are mostly created specifically for each exhibition site and disappear along with it. Loss thus becomes a central motif. Between preservation and decay, she reflects on the handling of change—in nature, systems, and history.
Her interest lies in the fragile and the processual: using ephemeral materials such as sugar, earth, or dough, she explores the boundaries between object, space, and action. Her works respond to contexts, dissolve, transform, and question possession, memory, and visibility.
Recently, photography has expanded this practice—not as documentation, but as a reflection on the desire to hold on in late capitalism. In doing so, popular and power-political layers intertwine, which she makes perceptible with a fine sensitivity to material and meaning.
Art and Space | Spatial Strategies (Iman Issa), Drawing (Veronika Dirnhofer)
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT)
Phase transitions form the starting point of Ludwig Stalla’s (*1989, Munich, DE) artistic practice. His works develop from the exploration of material structures and their inherent properties. Digital constructions, such as metal frames generated with rendering software, are transferred into the classical picture format and function as metaphors for an expanded concept of the image. Materials like metals, foams, or linen form a recurring vocabulary from which complex compositions emerge. The series Casings, for example, negotiates the interplay between enclosure and openness — the work remains situated in the moment of transition.
Rendering becomes an artistic-conceptual gesture in Stalla’s work: light gradients and surface textures are digitally simulated to create a visual reality that has no real origin. The frame is doubly referenced — both as a visible motif and as a reference to the hidden picture carrier. In this way, the works transcend the picture plane, in the sense of Craig Owens’ From Work to Frame, and reflect conditions of artistic production as well as global circulation processes. The Casings address not only design but also packaging, visibility, and transport.
The cloud and smoke motifs continue these ideas. They appear in an abstract pictorial space and evade clear placement — their reference lies more in the digital setup than in reality. The viewer’s gaze is redirected to the materiality of the pigments, to grids and structure. In this balance between controlled decision and apparent entropy, Stalla’s work situates itself — between simulation and substance, between image, frame, and context.
Text by Tatjana Schäfer (abridged)
Class of Pumhösl
Academy of Fine Arts Munich (DE)
Olga Shcheblykina’s expansive installations resemble scenes that resist a linear narrative: individual objects are distributed fragmentarily in space, as if detached from a larger pictorial context. Her sculptural works, with their full-bodied, tactile surfaces, appear like organic beings that refuse clear boundaries and seem to be in constant transformation. Her paintings, often impasto and corporeal, also push into the surrounding space, creating a vibrant, lively surface through spontaneous, unmixed colors.
Her hybrid forms, which combine painting and sculpture, challenge classical genre boundaries and exist in a transitional space where form and meaning remain in constant flux. Shcheblykina understands her art as an invitation to break open existing systems of order and to enable a diverse, open readability of body, space, and identity.
Painting and Graphics (Anne Speier, Ursula Hübner)
University of Art and Design Linz (AT)
What remains when a place disappears? When surfaces, worn down by generations, are replaced, discarded, or covered up? Ömer Faruk Kaplan begins exactly there, with the traces that are materially and metaphorically inscribed in wood, concrete, and glass. In his artistic practice, he examines how time, use, and memory are embedded in materials and how these can be transferred into new spatial constellations.
Kaplan’s works follow a serial logic: his wall objects made of cast concrete, German oak and spruce, or delicately twisted glass (SKINs) are repetitive, evenly arranged, and yet never identical. Their individuality reveals itself especially in the details. Traces of processing, cracks, and surface resistance make the works appear alive, as if they are in continuous dialogue with their environment.
As an artist of the third generation of immigrants in Germany, Ömer is shaped by a shared history, by questions of belonging, origin, and difference. His materials carry this complexity not illustratively, but rather as a structured surface, as a trace. His works are not representations of identity, but constructed bodies that do not capture time, movement, and memory — but keep them in motion.
Class of Pumhösl
Academy of Fine Arts Munich (DE)
Paria Shahrestani (*2001 in Tehran, Iran) approaches thinking deeply connected to drawing and painting—not as techniques, but as early-learned forms of expression where perception, memory, and emotion intertwine.
Even in her childhood, stories and fairy tales were not merely consumed but internalized and experienced. Her visual worlds are not illustrated narratives, but responses to the uncanny and the familiar within these stories, to the lost and the human reflected therein.
The experience of living between cultures and languages forms a second, equally formative layer of her work. This biography writes itself through tensions and transitions. Her works move along shifts, internal contradictions, and dense perceptual spaces. It is not difference that is articulated here, but overlap. The drawings and paintings open not through narrative but through gesture, line, texture, and suggestion.
Shahrestani understands her practice as a form of quiet observation, a movement between self and other. Her images avoid clarity; they exist in fragility. What they capture is less a message than a mood, a resonant space where gaze, experience, and intuition overlap. Her art remains quiet but insistent, creating a sensitive field that repeatedly questions the separation between image and viewer.
Class of Drawing (Veronika Dirnhofer)
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT)
Shuvo Rafiqul (*1982 in Dhaka, Bangladesh) lives and works in Vienna. His multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture, painting, video, drawing, installation, and photography.
Starting from a background in sculpture, Rafiqul approaches artistic questions with a strongly physical, material-based method. His earlier experience as a professional cricket player influences his engagement with time, movement, and interruption. His works address social and political processes, often from a personal perspective.
In his videos, he uses cuts, pauses, and repetitions to dissolve linear narrative structures. Drawings and collages work with overlays, fragments, and documentary found objects that are recontextualized.
As co-founder of the artist collective OGCJM, Rafiqul contributed to the development of the contemporary art scene in Dhaka. His works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Shanghai Biennale, Kunsthalle Zürich, Manggha Museum, and the Asian Art Biennale.
In 2020, he was awarded the STRABAG Artaward International.
Class of Drawing (Veronika Dirnhofer)
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT)
Valentino Skarwan (*1998 in Vienna, AT) works at the intersection of performance, sculpture, installation, video, and photography. Raised in Guatemala and Vienna, they navigate between different cultural and linguistic contexts, which is also reflected in their artistic practice: identity, belonging, and corporeality are understood as open, processual categories.
Skarwan creates spaces where new forms of togetherness can emerge: fluid places between visibility and dissolution, closeness and estrangement. Inspired by the indigenous cosmologies of Guatemala, myths, and contemporary narrative structures, their artistic work questions normative ideas about the body and its embedding in social and ecological systems. The relationship between humans and the environment is approached not as a rigid boundary but as a permeable network.
At the core is a poetic, queer perspective on the potential for transformation and mutual connection. The body is understood as a site of memory, change, and speculative possibility.
Class of Transmedia Art (Jakob Lena Knebl) & Fine Arts (Judith Eisler)
University of Applied Arts Vienna (AT)
Veronika Harb (*1985 in Graz, AT) lives and works in Vienna. In her installations, objects, and interventions, she explores the interplay between body, object, and space. The human body serves as a sensitive reference system, even when it is not physically present. Her works originate from everyday observations, social dynamics, and feminist questions, making power relations, dependencies, and isolation sensually perceptible.
For the work Vom Tasten und Begreifen I (On Touching and Understanding I), she uses discarded bicycle inner tubes and a ring-shaped steel frame. Through the interplay of tension and counter-tension, the frame is held in space without additional fixation. The materials stretch between heaviness and lightness, between resistance and compliance. An unstable balance emerges, referring to the delicate relationships between bodies and systems:
temporary, fragile, yet precisely positioned.
Sculpture Class (Ali Janka, Tobias Urban)
University of Art Linz (AT)