Kiefer Hablitzel Göhner Art Prize for Iulia Bucuresteanu

Master Fine Arts student  Iulia Bucuresteanu brings together a video, two cast-aluminium sculptures, and a concrete relief in a project that examines the complexities of post-socialist transformation. Her installation offers a lucid, unsentimental, and non-prescriptive perspective on a society negotiating the transition from its Soviet legacy toward aspirations of prosperity and self-determination.

In the video Megalomania, the camera traverses a succession of urban landscapes, moving from monumental Soviet architecture to the remnants of unrestrained capitalism. The work unfolds through a series of striking contrasts: from the promise of consumer abundance embodied in oversized advertisements for luxury goods to the vacant stalls of covered markets; from intimate domestic interiors to the presence of stray dogs inhabiting public space. Through its dynamic editing and carefully constructed soundtrack, the film infuses this portrait of contemporary Romania with a sense of vitality and subtle irony.

Drawing on emblematic sites, symbols, and everyday objects associated with Eastern Europe, Bucuresteanu foregrounds the marginal position to which these regions are often consigned within the enduring narrative of a cohesive and unified Europe. Her practice resists reductive binaries and familiar clichés, instead rendering visible the fractures, contradictions, and tensions that emerge between political and economic ambitions, the construction of national identities, and the lived realities of individual experience.

In February 2026, the jury selected seventeen artists from a pool of 175 applicants in an initial round and invited them to participate in the exhibition presented as part of the Swiss Art Awards in Basel. Following a second round of evaluation, seven emerging artists were awarded the Kiefer Hablitzel | Göhner Art Prize 2026, each receiving CHF 15,000. The prize is open to Swiss artists, artists based in Switzerland, and artists enrolled at Swiss universities, and is awarded in close collaboration with the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (BAK) and the Ernst Göhner Foundation.

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