The 2025 grants for Media Art go to Noah Berrie, Theresa Reiwer and Kwang-Ju Son!

The Stiftung Niedersachsen grant at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art supports a wide spectrum of media art, from video art and net-based projects to audio works and audiovisual installations. Each of the three grants will be awarded with €12,500 for the production of a new project in the area of media art.

Applications for the 2026 grants will be possible from December 2025 until February 2026 and will be advertised here on this page. If you want to be informed about the start of the application process, you can subscribe to the Haus for Media Art newsletter here.

The statement of the 2025 Jury:

For this year’s prize, we received a record number of 505 applications from all over the world, and the jury faced a significant challenge in selecting just three final grant recipients from such a high standard of proposed projects.

Of particular note, were certain themes and topics that concern contemporary artists today. Namely, a fascination with the future possibilities and problematics in the growth of AI technology; an emotional yearning for reconnection with nature in the context of environmental crises; the portrayal of homesickness in the face of global mobility; the pervasive but elusive presence of propaganda; a new interest in spirituality, and the concept of alienation as a basic condition of human existence. 

After careful consideration, the jury made its decision with the conviction that the collaboration would be as decisive and transformative for the selected projects as it would be for the institution itself.

Throughout the programme Haus für Medienkunst has already reinvented itself at different times into: a museum, a mausoleum and a cube that promotes autonomy by democratic digital means, This year it will be transformed into a sound instrument by the newly proposed project by the young US/UK artist Noah Berrie. ANTIPHON is a large-scale sound installation that transforms the space into a living, resonant instrument, to a tool through which visitors experience the significance of their own personal presence, their impact on each other and the space. At its core this work is an interplay between architecture, resonance, and electromagnetic force. The result is a constantly shifting sonic environment: at times a soft murmur of harmonic overtones, at others a dense field of resonating metal and transmission artifacts which is in constant relation to the moving bodies of the audience. Functioning, in effect, as both an elegant sonic experience and an aesthetic portrait of the architecture, the institution and its possibilities.  The work invites audiences to listen not just to sound, but to the architectures of resonance and control that surround us, reconfiguring the Haus für Medienkunst as an instrument of signal, space, and feedback.

Among the many proposals dealing with the political and philosophical dilemmas surrounding the wider use of AI technologies, German artist Theresa Reiwer submitted a particularly interesting one titled The World Within – The World Without. The final project will be an interactive, multichannel video and game installation that explores societal expectations of the perfect body and its optimisation and presentation. The jury found the artist's personal and intimate approach most appealing, as the project is based on the medical condition of a close family member and tackles relevant questions such as: does the digital double only increase the pressure on our physical body, or can it also assist it and take some of the burden off? Does the pressure only apply to those perceived as female, or also to cisgender men? What does a dysfunctional body mean in an age of hypercapitalism? Isn't it genuinely human to not work perfectly? What is particularly compelling about Reiwer’s proposal is her imaginative exploration of AI’s possibilities to both extend and intimately explore her father’s condition and his world. The artist’s work seems innovative and considered in a time where the relatively superficial enactments of AI’s possibilities and its dangers seems to be ubiquitous.  

The Korean filmmaker, Kwang-Ju Son: The Holy City is an ambitious filmic project that offers an unexpected portrayal of organised Christianity in the modern state of Korea. “Korean Christianity, an imported faith, has historically navigated tensions with colonialism, division, and modernization. The project examines this `otherness,‘ particularly how the cross, embodying Korea's modern history, is perceived and transformed”, says the artist in the application. While exploring Christianity's political and economic alignments in South Korea in a historical context and its current social embeddedness, or the lack thereof, the filmic project positions the cross as a cultural and historical artifact that reflects the transformations and distortions of modernity. Son will examine religion’s impact as a driver of both social ideological cohesion on one hand and, conversely, social repression on the other. We find this robust choice of subject matter and her intelligent and ambitious form of filmmaking very exciting at this time.  

The jury would like to thank all the applicants who honored us by engaging with this process.

The jury: Nikolett Eross (OFF-Biennial Budapest), Annie Fletcher (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Edit Molnár (HAUS), Marcel Schwierin (HAUS).