Inside the final chapter of the Henrike Grohs Art Award and the artists who reshaped its legacy.
30 April 2026
At the heart of this final chapter stands Rehema Chachage, a Tanzanian artist whose work unfolds like a living archive. Named the 2026 laureate, Chachage received a 20,000-euro prize and support for a major publication. Yet the recognition feels almost secondary to the depth of her practice. Her art does not seek spectacle. It invites immersion.
Chachage works across performance, video, text, scent, and installation, weaving them into layered, sensory environments. But the true core of her work lies elsewhere, in memory passed through generations. Collaborating closely with her mother and grandmother, she constructs what she calls a performative archive. Stories, rituals, songs, and gestures move through her body, transforming personal history into shared experience. In her hands, the body becomes both vessel and voice.
The jury was struck not only by her conceptual clarity but by the way her work dissolves boundaries. It moves fluidly between community and institution, between intimacy and public space. One juror described this duality as a rare balance, noting that her practice “resides in the community” while also inhabiting galleries and schools with equal ease. Chachage’s art does not belong to a single site. It travels, carrying with it the echoes of home, belonging, and care.
If Chachage’s work is rooted in memory and continuity, the practices of the two finalists unfold through disruption and tension.
Younès Ben Slimane, a Tunisian filmmaker and visual artist, operates in near silence. His work strips away language, relying instead on image, rhythm, and absence. Through film and installation, he interrogates the authority of cinematic structures themselves. What happens when narrative dissolves, when spectators are denied the comfort of explanation?
Slimane answers not with clarity but with disorientation. His images resist easy reading. They unsettle the viewer, forcing a confrontation with the assumptions embedded in visual culture. The jury described his approach as political in its quiet, a form of resistance that speaks without words yet carries undeniable force. In a world saturated with noise, his silence becomes radical.
In contrast, Egyptian artist Rania Atef turns toward participation and play. Her work moves through the domestic sphere, examining how spaces of care are also spaces of labour. Kitchens, living rooms, and shared environments become stages where power dynamics are revealed and reworked.
Atef does not position the audience as passive observers. Instead, she invites them into the work. Through performative strategies, viewers become participants, entangled in the very systems the work seeks to expose. The familiar becomes strange. The private becomes public. And through this shift, Atef demonstrates how art can activate not just thought but embodied awareness.
The jury noted her ability to transform perception itself, showing how artistic experience can move beyond representation into lived encounter. In Atef’s practice, art is not something to look at. It is something to enter.
Together, these three artists form a constellation of approaches. One grounded in ancestral memory, one in visual disruption, and one in collective activation. What unites them is a shared commitment to challenging dominant narratives and rethinking the structures that shape how stories are told.
The scale of the award’s final edition underscores its significance. More than 600 applications arrived from over 30 African countries, a testament to its reach and resonance across the continent. Over the years, the Henrike Grohs Art Award became more than a prize. It became a space of recognition, a platform where diverse voices could emerge and connect.
Its conclusion, then, is not an ending but a transformation.
As Benjamin Bergner of the Goethe-Institut reflected, the award has long stood for artistic freedom and exchange, honouring the legacy of Henrike Grohs herself. That legacy now continues through the artists it has supported, the communities they engage with, and the questions they leave behind.
In Chachage’s layered performances, Slimane’s quiet disruptions, and Atef’s participatory encounters, we glimpse the future of artistic practice. It is a future that resists fixed forms. A future that values process over product, connection over isolation, and multiplicity over singular narratives.
The final edition of the Henrike Grohs Art Award does not close a chapter. It opens a field of echoes, where memory, resistance, and imagination continue to unfold.
