Ivan Juritz Prize Shortlist 2025

SOUND

Fá Maria, ‘ERASURE’

AI technologies can particularly amplify gender-specific, racist, classist, and other biases. For example, unique vocal expressions are generally overlooked or misinterpreted by AI models often programmed with voices shaped by cultural assumptions about ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, leaving aside the complexity and richness of the human voice particularly queer and trans voices. ERASURE integrates AI tools into the creative process by training AI models on a diverse group of queer and trans voices. The work merges digital and human voices to celebrate unique vocal expressions while simultaneously challenging the inherent biases within AI systems. If on the one hand, these tools can extend our capabilities, they also raise profound questions about representation, agency and transparency.

Fá Maria is an artist and composer based between Berlin and London. Drawing from their experience as a former psychiatrist, Fá Maria works at the intersection of sound, the human body, and technology, investigating how bodies—human, artificial, and hybrid—co-produce meaning in an era of increasingly porous boundaries between the organic and synthetic. Their work spans live performances, audio-visual installations, and also music scores for dance pieces and movies. Their work has been presented at institutions such as the Tate Modern, KCUA Gallery Kyoto, Liverpool Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. They are also a PhD candidate in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths College University of London.

George Cloke, ‘Earth Is All Melody‘

‘Earth Is All Melody’ weaves field recordings, interviews and non-human polyphonies into a speculative soundscape of an ecological utopia. Drawing on discussions between the artist and environmental activists, disability rights campaigners, sci-fi writers and urban architects, this sonically envisioned future celebrates community, multi-species interconnection and listening reciprocity. The soundscape is augmented through Korean Sign Language, further encouraging the listener-viewer to attune themselves to diverse languages and voices. This artwork invites audiences to consider new ways of contemplating sustainability and kinship within present and future temporalities, aligning with modernism’s radical reshaping of society through ‘a utopian desire to create a better world’ (Wilk 2008).

George Cloke is an audio-visual artist and environmental researcher from the UK. His practice explores themes of ecological awareness, attentive listening and acoustic imagination. His moving image and sound art works have been exhibited at Asia Culture Centre, Barbican Centre, Busan International Short Film Festival and Cambodia International Film Festival. As a PhD candidate and CHASE Scholar at SOAS, his academic research focuses on riverine ecologies in Southeast Asian moving image. As an electronic musician releasing on the Japanese label Flau, his music has been featured on BBC Radio 1, 6 Music, NTS and Spotify.

IMAGE

Anna Curzon Price, ‘The Pair in Her Eyes‘

My practice seeks to disrupt traditional ways in which the female body is represented in Western painting. I want to challenge the standard relationship that holds in the modernist white-cube gallery between passive art object and active viewer. ‘Dirty Kisses’ and ‘TRASH!’ are paintings which are displayed on the floor. In order to view the painting, the spectator must walk over – and thereby violate – it. In my performance ‘The Pair in her Face’, I wear my naked self-portrait and use my painted face as a mask through which I stare down viewers of my painted nudity. Against Clement Greenberg’s idea that the essential quality of painting is flatness, my works are crinkled, breathing, fragile interventions in the space, rejecting the two-dimensionality of the picture.

Anna Curzon Price was born in White City, London, in 1999. She is currently studying an MA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and completed a BA in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2020. She won the Richard Ford Award for my drawing in the Prado Museum in 2024 and the Janet Newman scholarship to the Essential School of Painting in 2021-22. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Terrace Gallery, Queercircle and Kettle’s Yard.

Zijing Ye, ‘breeding migration‘

My degree show installation explores the intersections of borders, sovereignty, and restricted mobility. Central to the work is a large metallic water tank filled with seawater collected from the English Channel, containing a swimming pool lane divider used to symbolically mark maritime boundaries. Surrounding this centerpiece are seawater-filled jerry cans, saliva from an individual denied entry into the UK, and postcards faintly illustrating acts of border delineation. Suspended overhead, the phrase ‘Sovereignty begins where movement stops’ encapsulates the tension between territorial control and personal freedom, inviting reflection on institutional power, identity, and the invisible yet impactful presence of borders.

Zijing Ye is a Chinese artist currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her interdisciplinary practice incorporates sculpture, installation, video, and performance, critically exploring themes of identity, migration, national boundaries, and institutional constraints. Her recent projects include site-responsive installations that interrogate borders and freedom through material experimentation, often using unconventional media like the border itself and fish skin. Zijing has exhibited internationally and received several accolades, including the Batsford Prize for Fine Art and the Kuma Foundation Scholarship. She is committed to creating work that provokes reflection on global mobility and belonging.

TEXT

James Bussell, ‘HEY I’M JESUS‘

This story is partly about my deep affection for Boston. The city has a personality that sucker punches you right away; people everywhere are staving off brutal weather with just a scarf and coffee. They’re people who’ll never tell you a lie—preferring instead a scathing but necessary honesty. What happens when their strong identity gets upturned by something as huge as new religious lore? I wanted to explore how a tough protagonist would approach this altered reality. I hope my interpretation holds true to Bostonians’ mettle.

James Bussell is a writer from Hastings, Aotearoa New Zealand. He studied Philosophy and English at Harvard University and now studies Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. His poetry appears in From Arthur’s Seat, an anthology of short stories and poems by the current MSc class at the University of Edinburgh. In his work, he aims to be funny and raw, examining his ties to messy things like masculinity. His work can also be found on jamesbussell.com.

Marcia Nemer, ‘I forget‘ (excerpt)

In the last days of June 2024 I learned something I would rather not know. Aware that the act of forgetting is something that often simply happens, I started a daily practice of checking if I could still remember what I would like to forget. The question I found myself asking as time passed and I failed is if the desire to remember is what makes us forget.

Marcia Nemer is an artist from Brazil. Currently living in Stockholm where she is a doctoral student at the Stockholm University of Art (SKH) with her project ‘Staging Absence’. She is interested in exploring the possibilities relating to presence and absence in theatre, more specifically what happens to the work of the actor when we move it past representation. In her practice, she enjoys creating friction between theatre, visual arts and performance (that often involves a surprising amount of paper, glue, paint and cardboard), as well as reflecting on reading and writing, memory and time.