July 14, 2026·Prize

Winner Announcement - SAR Annual Prize for Excellent Research Catalogue Exposition 2025

The Executive Board of SAR is delighted to announce the winner of the SAR Annual Prize for Excellent Research Catalogue Exposition 2025.

The SAR Annual Prize for Excellent Research Catalogue Exposition aims to foster and encourage innovative, experimental new formats of publication and to increase the visibility of the qualities of artistic research artefacts. The creator receives the annual prize money of €500. The jury for the 2025 prize has been Jan Schacher (chair), Paulo Luís Almeida, and Åsa Unander-Scharin. For this year’s prize, 26 nominations were received. The jury has unanimously selected a clear winner of the 2025 prize as well as two runners-up.

The jury awards first place to the exposition "Seen from a place, developed from a point" by Annika Borg for it's deep and rich expositional usage of the research catalogue. 

The bi-lingual exposition conveys a long-term artistic practice in different arrangements and formats, collecting a substantial amount of work as a coherent whole. The exposition reflects the working methods of the artist and exposes processes in addition to outcomes. It provides clear insights into these processes, from the ideation part to a shift into transformational axes, from algorithmic transformations into constellations of forms and formats. These serve as entry points to the readers to a vast network of expositional approaches. 

The development map provides a synthesis and enables moving from a narrow premise into varied and proliferating formats. The exposition represents an outstanding exemplar of usage of the platform in modes of exposing and experiencing that are rich and differentiated.

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2nd place is awarded to Live Maria Roggen and Ingfrid Breie Nyhus for the exposition "(un)Romantic/Improvising interpretation", which presents a compelling access to refined and rich traces of a shared artistic research process and serves as a rigorous documentation of the research project. Enabling both a longitudinal and vertical reading through a series of videos, expanded by conversations and reflection in textual form, the exposition exemplifies the potentials for linear cataloguing and the publication format available on this platform. Questioning the concepts of the romantic and unromantic and investigating processes of collaborative interpretation, the exposition invites the reader to navigate between the space of documentary videos and more association-based writings and traces arranged around them.

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3rd place is awarded to Elina Koivisto for the exposition "Rethinking material relations through feminist architectural practice" which presents a well designed articulation of a practice-based research. In a well-told story, material practices are shown to enable multi-faceted access in pedagogical contexts. This represents an approach to architecture that moves away from "frozen" objects toward ever-changing processes. Enmeshed with more-than-human agents and aligning with feminist theories, the exposition emphasises "staying with the trouble" and embracing the uncertainty and vitality of materials, rather than forcing them into rigid, static forms. The physical exhibition featured a modular library built from local and regenerative materials with "extreme locality", using regenerative sourcing, and self-grown materials.