2025 Henki Art Prize Announcement
Henki Art Prize Announces Its 2025 Finalists
For Immediate Release
Five artists whose practices illuminate movement, resilience, and the evolving language of water
Henki Art is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2025 Henki Art Prize. Known for defining the role of water in contemporary art, the Prize advances research-driven practices that understand water not only as material, but as a philosophical and cultural force. This year’s edition takes its theme from the words of Pope Francis, who reflected on the vitality of motion through a simple truth: when water moves, it sustains life; when it stagnates, it deteriorates. In memory of his legacy, the 2025 theme Camminare invites artists to consider how we walk forward through transformation, uncertainty, and renewal.
Selected by an international jury, this year’s shortlist brings together five artists whose practices reveal movement across matter, memory, technology, and ecology. Each offers a distinct response to the tension between flow and stillness, asking how the language of water can illuminate the ways we endure, transform, and continue.
Ben Stephenson – Brotes de Jilotes
Oaxaca, Mexico
A living, time-based sculpture shaped by the ecological rhythms of Oaxaca. Blocks of pigment-tinted ice embedded with seeds slowly melt into soil, creating a cycle of dissolution, absorption, and growth. Stephenson’s work collapses sculpture and agriculture, embodying the theme of Camminare through a process where water carries ancestral knowledge forward and movement becomes a form of resilience.
Medium: Ice, soil, wood, seeds
Armand Diansambu – Reduced Desire
Ottawa, Canada
Rooted in Bantu cosmologies, Diansambu transforms Dutch wax fabric through ritual gesture and sustained contact with water. The work navigates cultural memory, diaspora, and the shifting architectures of identity. His sculptural paintings mirror the journey of walking through inherited histories while resisting stagnation, allowing water to become both witness and catalyst.
Medium: Acrylic and water on Dutch wax printed cotton
Alexander Collinson & XinYue Ma – Intertidal
London, United Kingdom
An immersive audiovisual installation where a central ceramic form rises from a digital shoreline. Surrounding fragments pulse like organs in a post-human body, connected through cables, sensors, and sound. The artists build a speculative ecology in which water becomes circuitry, breath, and connective tissue. Their work reflects Camminare as a negotiation between organic and technological futures held in fragile equilibrium.
Medium: Ceramic, found materials, video, audio, digital screens
Gleb Ivany – Ascension
Moscow, Russia
A conceptual sculpture cast in pure silver, encased in concrete, and revealed only through the slow action of dripping water. Suspended between emergence and erosion, the work inhabits a temporal space in which movement is minimal yet essential. Ivany’s practice speaks to the theme’s core: even the smallest flow has the power to reshape matter across years or centuries.
Medium: Silver casting encased in concrete
Claudia Kaatziza Cortínez – Bosque de Sal
New York, United States
A series of analogue gum prints created with pigments from the salt-altered landscapes of Epecuén, Argentina. Developed slowly in water, each print emerges through softening, lifting, and reformation. Cortínez translates geological memory into photographic language, revealing how landscapes record movement across generations and how water preserves the residues of both loss and renewal.
Medium: Analogue pigment gum prints, steel structure
Online Exhibition and Catalogue
The works of all finalists will be presented in a dedicated online exhibition accompanied by a digital catalogue. The exhibition expands Henki’s commitment to accessibility, research, and the evolving discourse surrounding water’s role in contemporary art.
Explore the Exhibition
The artworks of the Prize Finalists and Longlisted Artists are now available to view on our gallery page. We invite you to explore their powerful works and learn more about their unique perspectives on the theme.
About the Henki Art Prize
The Henki Art Prize supports artists who expand the cultural, conceptual, and material possibilities of water in contemporary art. Rooted in research, experimentation, and interdisciplinary thinking, Henki is committed to exploring the diverse expressions of water and positioning this field at the center of global art discourse.
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