The University of Applied Arts Vienna and the City of Vienna have awarded the Vanessa Preger McGillivray Prize to Valentin Unger at the graduation ceremony. The graduate of the photography department at the Institute for Fine and Media Art was honored for his outstanding diploma project titled “Lieblingshobby Kunst”. In his work, Unger deals with processes of consumption and appropriation and examines the mediation of art as a remix through appropriation.

The jury praised the work as “concise in form and content” and particularly emphasized the innovative examination of the medium of the art catalog as an archive of knowledge and images. “Individual gestures and reproduction meet in his image-text tableaux, which were created in a performative act with the reflected-light scanner in the library of the Angewandte,” the jury explained.

In its decision, the jury of the Vanessa Preger-McGillivray Prize 2024 states that the prizewinner Emma Kling shows images in her work that are materially and metaphorically multi-layered, subtly addressing latent relationships of violence as the presence of (painting) history: "Images about metamorphoses of images and their pictorial spaces, about the possibility and impossibility of transitions between image and reality. Canvas becomes painted fabric, layers of paint become featherbed, become skin, become bark, become scab. Daphne was not transformed, she transforms herself. Pictures that break free from their torpor and prefer to run off on small legs instead of surrendering to their circumstances. (And of course they can't really do that, but they can talk about it)."

The Vanessa Preger-McGillivray Prize 2023 of the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the City of Vienna goes to Elisabeth Katharina Gritsch. With her work Rücken Richtung Wand, Gritsch made a lasting impression and convinced the jury. The diploma work is characterized by a sensitively painted reflection that is marked by a concentrated urgency. The paintings represent performative constellations of psychosocial spaces that permanently oscillate between stasis and the possibility of departure.

The second prize winner and graduate from the department of Site-Specific Art Sara Ghalandari impressed the jury with her work titled "Circle as Space".

Her thesis explores the relationship between the human figure and space, both on a symbolic and concrete level. The expansive installation is a hybrid between textile and sculpture, made of fabric-covered wire, following the materiality and construction of the hoop skirt. The relationship between body and space, of human form and geometric form as an ideal for harmonious proportions, is hinted at, but the formal and material reduction eludes any idealization or unambiguous reading. The work emphasizes the individuality of the bodies in relationship to each other and to the community. On the other hand stands the circle as a spiritual, mystical form - across all cultures and times - as a symbol of unity and protection and as a space for ritual actions. Ghalandari subtly interweaves all these contexts and levels of meaning of the circular motif and its materialization into one multi-layered installation that combines sculptural body, space and architecture.

Maria Cozma convinced the jury with her work titled „It’s an early winter evening and even though it’s not particularly late, the time has lent the sky an almost prematurely darkened cast.“ “The thesis project by Maria Cozma has achieved a precise and poetic frugality, which is centred on absence, and thereby questions how we act and speak,” the diploma jury explains their decision. The jury was headed by Henning Bohl and included the teachers Judith Eisler, Gabriele Rothemann, Paul Petritsch, Hans Schabus, and Jan Svenungsson.