At the opening of the Graduate Show on July 10, 2025 at HFBK Hamburg, the Karl H. Ditze Prize, worth €10,000, and the HFBK Film Prize of the Fischer Foundation, worth €5,000, were awarded to the most remarkable artistic graduates: Around 150 bachelor’s and master’s graduates in painting, sculpture, time-based media and stage design, design, graphic design/photography, and film competed for the prizes.

About the winners:

Merve Kaplan (Prof. Eva-Maria Bauer) – Karl H. Ditze Prize for the best bachelor’s thesis, worth €4,000

In her work “Yoldaş,” Merve Kaplan impressively formulates the disciplinary overlaps into a total work of art and manages to translate Gelsenkirchen Baroque into minimalism. According to the jury, Kaplan shows unparalleled precision in her handling of objects and their scaling, reflecting the dynamics of commodity cycles. Her installation goes far beyond biographical references, captivating viewers with its profound sensitivity, honesty, and poetry, and has the potential to become an expanded archive.

Eda Aslan (Prof. Michaela Melián, Prof. Kader Attia) – Karl H. Ditze Prize for the best master’s thesis, worth €6,000

With her installation “Tears are falling but never touching each other,” Eda Aslan artistically appropriates a historical practice from the Mediterranean region of collecting tears in a vessel and translates it into an innovative formal language. Her fragile glass vessels, blown into the shape of tears, are filled with water from the Mediterranean Sea, which gradually evaporates until only the salt remains. The installation symbolizes the healing process and materializes it at the same time. Aslan’s work is thus poetic and highly political: it takes its concrete starting point in the grief over the ongoing denial of the genocide of Armenians in Turkey and opens our eyes to the multitude of unresolved conflicts worldwide, enabling it to appeal to people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Patricia Sanhudo (Prof. Robert Bramkamp) – HFBK Film Prize donated by the Fischer Foundation in the amount of 5,000 euros

The documentary film “A primeira flor do nosso jardim / The First Flower of Our Garden” (DE/PT 2025, 53 min, HD, color) is a long-term cinematic portrait in which people collide with actions, objects with circumstances, dreams with nightmares. Over a period of seven years, the director filmed her parents in order to consistently, astutely, and fearlessly process an experience of violence from her childhood that reverberated in her parents’ home for many years, continues to shape the ambivalent relationships in her family to this day, and was captured by her camera for all time. A horror film that makes socially and personally repressed experiences tangible and analyzes them in equal measure. A film by and for people who do not want to be paralyzed by violence and invisibility.

The film jury awarded honorable mentions to Farina Mietchen for her documentary film “Hinterlegte Nummern” (DE 2025, 25 min, Mini DV) and to Ilias Merabiha for his hybrid film “A Compassionate Protocol” (DE/FR 2025, 30 min, color). The exhibition featuring all films and final art projects is open to the public through Sunday. Admission is free. Public tours are available without registration and free of charge.

The jury for the Karl H. Ditze Prize:
Liberty Adrien, curator, KW Berlin
Noura Dirani, director, Kunsthalle St. Annen Lübeck
Gürsoy Doğtaş, independent curator and author, Munich
Manuel Miseur, director, Galerie Esther Schipper Berlin
Alicja Schindler, art critic, Berlin
Ana Siler, Director, Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg

The jury for the HFBK Film Prize:
Madeleine Bernstorff, Artistic Director, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
Dennis Vetter, Film Critic, Curator, and Co-Director, Critics’ Week Berlin
Ulrich Ziemons, Director, Berlinale Section Forum Expanded, Berlin

Exhibition | July 11–13, 2025 | 2–8 p.m.
Public tours | Daily at 4 and 6 p.m. (German), 4 p.m. (English) | Sat + Sun 4 p.m. for children aged 6 and up | in German Sign Language (DGS) Fri 5:30 p.m. + Sun 3 p.m.
kinder kunst raum #8 | Sat + Sun 3–6 p.m., cafeteria foyer
Locations | HFBK Hamburg | Lerchenfeld 2 + 2a | Wartenau 15 | Finkenau 42

(11.07.25)