BARCELONA.- The Fundació Joan Miró has announced the names of the five artists nominated for the ninth edition of the Joan Miró Prize. The award, one of the most important in the international art world, recognises and promotes the work of artists whose practices have a major impact on the development of contemporary art.
The Joan Miró Prize pays tribute to the extraordinary legacy of Joan Miró, both for his fundamental contribution to modern art and for his lifelong commitment to young artists. The award is given every two years to contemporary artists whose recent work reflects the spirit of research, innovation and commitment that characterised Miró’s artistic practice.
The list of artist finalists showcases creators at a key moment in their careers, characterised by a consolidated initial success. This call reflects a commitment diversity, including artists of different ages, genders and cultural identities, for the uniqueness and relevance of their creative proposals.
The Joan Miró Prize also promotes an innovative educational project that links the school environment. Now in its ninth year, this project, in collaboration with Pau Sans in L’Hospitalet, encourages the active participation of through creative inspired by the exhibitions of the prize winners. The initiative important because it encourages educational network that fosters intercultural dialogue and contact contemporary art.
The artists nominated for the 2025 edition of the Joan Miró Prize are as follows, in alphabetical order:
• Palestinian, Canadian-raised artist Jumana Emil Abboud (b. 1971) is based between Jerusalem and London where she is completing her PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art. Before the recent and ongoing Israeli Palestinian conflict, Abboud developed a practice that was closely connected to the Palestinian landscape--including its water sources--, its shared histories and traditional folktales. Her work includes spoken- word performance, video, drawing, textiles, and journaling, as well as other collaborative activities, such as group meditations. Her work has been presented at Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (2024), Cample Line (2023), Tavros Athens (2022), Documenta Fifteen (2022), Casco Art Institute (2020), the Khaled Shoman Foundation Darat al Funun (2017), and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (2016), among other venues, as well as at international biennials such Sydney (2022), Sharjah (2017), Venice (2015 and 2009), and Istanbul (2009). Abboud is one of the nominees for the 11 Artes Mundi Prize (2025).
She has also been awarded the AFAC Grant, the Pernod Ricard Fellowship, in addition to the Sharjah Art Foundation production grant, and she has participated in numerous art residencies around the world.
• Born in 1961 in Bandung, Indonesia, Arahmaiani made a name for herself in the 1980s as a pioneer in the field of performance art in Southeast Asia. Her performances and artworks, made in a variety of media, deal with social, territorial, as well as religious themes that have had an impact on Asian societies, from her native Indonesia to Tibet, with a special, critical focus on women’s lives and oppressed minorities. A major survey of her work was presented at Museum Macan in Jakarta in 2019, and, more recently, in 2024, she presented a performance and large paintings at Tate, under the title Burning Country, addressing racially motivated violence in Indonesia. Since her breakthrough in 1980, Arahmaiani’s works have been performed and exhibited widely in museums and biennials, including the Venice Biennale (2003), the Gwangju Biennale (2002), Bienal de São Paulo (2002), Biennale de Lyon (2000) and the Bienal de la Habana (1997). In New York City, she had two solo shows at the Tyler Gallery (2014 and 2016) and was included in group exhibitions at the Asia Society (1996), as well at the Brooklyn Museum (2007).
• Bonnie Devine (b. Toronto, Canada, 1952) is an installation and performance artist, sculptor, curator, and writer from the Serpent River First Nation of Ontario. Based in Toronto, she is a retired associate professor at OCAD University where she was founding chair of its Indigenous Visual Cultural Program. Her work in different media, including land art projects, draws from the pictorial and material culture, storytelling, and belief system of the Ojibwa Anishinaabe first nation to which she belongs. Devine reinterprets that ancestral legacy while referring to both historical conflict and oppression and current crises affecting indigenous groups and territories, such as destructive mining operations. Devine’s artworks can be found in major collections, including the National Museum of the American Indian (USA), the National Gallery of Canada and the Eiteljorg Museum (USA). She has received numerous grants and awards, both in her native Canada and in the USA, such as the Eiteljorg Fellowship of Contemporary Native American Art in 2011, and in 2021 the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Her solo exhibition Bonnie Devine: The Tecumseh Papers was held at the Art Gallery of Windsor in 2013.
• Kapwani Kiwanga (b. 1978) is an anthropologist by training, multidisciplinary Canadian artist who lives and works in Paris.
Her research-based work is conceived as an experimental archive that complicates received hegemonic histories on the collective experience of the African diaspora and the power imbalances at place in the deployment of Western colonialism and late capitalism. Her installations invite audiences to reflect upon the impact the spaces we inhabit have on their users, both through their design and their histories. Among her recent major exhibitions are those at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2023), CAPC Bordeaux (2023) and Museu Serralves (2024). Her special commissions for the High Line in New York City and Bozar in Brussels (both unveiled in 2023) explored the intertwined histories of botany and colonial exploitation. More recently, she represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Kiwanga has received the Frieze Artist Award and the Sobey Prize for the Arts (both in 2018), the Prix Marcel Duchamp (2020), the Zurich Art Prize (2022), as well as the Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University in 2022-23 and the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in 2023.
• Christodoulos Panayiotou (b. 1978) is a renowned Cypriot artist based in Athens. Panayiotou’s deeply personal work spans a wide range of media, including performance, installations, sculpture, painting, video and photography. His practice applies a queer, subversive lens on the uncovering of hidden narratives in the visual and material records of history, especially but not exclusively those of his native Cyprus and Greece. His most recent project, a five-hour-long performance titled Dying on Stage, toured around France and Switzerland in 2023 and 2024. It was presented at LUMA Arles in 2023, along with a retrospective exhibition titled One Year. The performance was also shown at the Luxembourg National Theatre in collaboration with the Casino Luxembourg which held another solo exhibition titled My Last Will (2024) that had been developed in 2023 for the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz. Panayiotou represented Cyprus at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and his work has been featured at numerous international biennials and museum exhibitions. In 2019 he curated an Emma Kunz exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London. He currently runs an independent art space in Limassol (Cyprus) called The Island Club.
These artists have been selected by an inter- national jury composed of renowned professionals from the art world and representatives of the award’s official sponsors:
• Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation (United Arab Emirates)
• Pablo Lafuente, Artistic Director of MAM (Museu de Arte Moderna) in Rio de Janeiro
• Ann-Sofi Noring, former Co-Director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (Sweden) and current member of the Administrative Board of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts
• Marie Hélène Pereira, Senior Curator for Performative Practices at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
• Wayne Griffiths, CEO of CUPRA
• Marko Daniel, Director of Barcelona’s Fundació Joan Miró and jury president
The name of the winning artist will be announced on 8 May 2025 at a ceremony to be held at Barcelona’s Fundació Joan Miró. The award consists of a grant of 50,000 euros and the opportunity for the winning artist to hold a new exhibition at the Fundació Joan Miró in the year following its announcement.
The award’s eighteen-year history has demonstrated how linking the legacy of Joan Miró with the work of contemporary creators leads to enriching dialogues and synergies that boost the careers of winning artists. This connection not only enhances the value and relevance of all the parties involved, but also highlights the validity of Joan Miró’s creative process, which is revitalised in each edition through the various perspectives of the winning artists. Ever since its creation in 2007, the Joan Miró Prize has been awarded to artists of the calibre of Olafur Eliasson (2007), Pipilotti Rist (2009), Mona Hatoum (2011), Roni Horn (2013), Ignasi Aballí (2015), Kader Attia (2017), Nalini Malani (2019) and Tuan Andrew Nguyen (2023).
