The Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) warmly congratulates its professor Susanne Kriemann on receiving the After Nature Prize 26. The Berlin exhibition venue C/O Berlin has announced that Susanne Kriemann and Stelios Kallinikou are the winners of the After Nature Prize 26. The double exhibition will be on display for the first time at C/O Berlin in the Amerika Haus from September 12, 2026, to February 3, 2027.

The After Nature Prize is a joint project of the C/O Berlin Foundation and the Crespo Foundation. Each year, the prize enables the realization of two research-intensive projects and honors artists or groups who explore new concepts of nature in photography and visual media through their work. The prize includes prize money of 40,000 euros each, an exhibition at C/O Berlin and an accompanying publication.

Susanne Kriemann's project ties in with her long-standing preoccupation with uranium and the atomic age. At the interface of photography, science and poetry, she uses pitchblende, also known as uraninite and one of the oldest minerals on earth, as a starting point to reflect geological and atomic time scales. To this end, she draws on early photographic processes such as autoradiography, screen printing and heliography. The works combine the abstract aesthetics that radiation leaves behind on the photographic material with poetic texts and a site-specific scenography. Kriemann explores the role of pitchblende, an important source material for the discovery of radioactivity, in the history of photography and science as well as in current debates about nuclear energy and nuclear armament. Her project opens up a critical examination of the visual worlds and applications of radioactivity and invites us to understand radiation as a central factor in the relationship between humans and the environment.

The winning project concepts will be realized for the first time as part of After Nature Prize 26. After its first stop at C/O Berlin, the double exhibition will be on display from spring 2027 in the Open Space of the Crespo Foundation in Frankfurt am Main.

Members of the jury were Bergit Arends (Associate Lecturer, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London), Taous Dahmani (Curator, The Photographers' Gallery, London), Kateryna Radchenko (Director, Odesa Photo Days, Kyiv), Boaz Levin (Curator and Co-Program Director, C/O Berlin) and Katharina Täschner (curator, C/O Berlin), Ben Livne Weitzman (Crespo Foundation, independent curator of the Glenkeen Garden Residencies and the Glenkeen Variations exhibition series), Christina Töpfer (editor-in-chief, Camera Austria, Graz) and Bernard Vienat (director, art-werk, Geneva).
The decision was unanimous and was based on the nominations of 11 international experts.