The Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography by the City of Graz, which is awarded biennially, will be bestowed on Jakob Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik (b. 1990, Munich, DE, and 1995, Ljubljana, SI, both live and work in Den Haag, NL) in 2025.

“The jury was profoundly moved by Jakob Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik’s empathetic yet methodical dissection of the visual and linguistic paradigms underpinning the proliferation of radical fascist ideologies, both online and offline. Their meticulously researched bodies of work use photography, graphic design, interviews, publications, video installations, and exhibition design to expose the insidious dissemination of masculinist, far-right vocabulary in our daily visual culture through memes, tattoos, TikTok videos, advertising posters, architectural motifs, and ableist communication.
Series such as Bereitschaft (2024), Redpilled (2023), and Haut, Stein (2017–20) actively engage with the aesthetic strategies of alt-right propaganda, revealing its embedded continuity with historical lexicons. The duo’s productive collaborations confront the subject humanely, with sensitivity and trust, as if seeking to retrieve the individual from the violent ideology.
Their perspective imbues their work with a striking sense of depth, urgency, and humanity, while igniting questions of accountability. Their practice resonated deeply with concerns shared by jury members about the ongoing political shifts in Western culture which threaten the very premises of democracy.”

Jury
Rosalyn D’Mello, Tramin, intersectional feminist writer, art critic, essayist, editor, educator, and researcher
Thomas Geiger, Vienna, artist and cofounder of Mark Pezinger Books
Christian Joschke, professor of art history and photography at Beaux-arts de Paris, cofounder of the magazine Transbordeur: Photographie histoire société, Paris
Kateryna Radchenko, Kyiv, director of Odesa Photo Days, curator, artist, and researcher of photography
Christina Töpfer, Camera Austria

The Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography by the City of Graz was established in 1989 and is bestowed every two years on an artist who has published a noteworthy contribution in the magazine Camera Austria International and has made an important contribution to contemporary photography. The prize-money is Euro 15,000.

Jakob Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik’s work has been published in Camera Austria International no. 169/2025 together with an interview between the artists and Raimar Stange.