K21 Global Art Award 2025 winner: Tadáskía

K20K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, in cooperation with the Friends of the Kunstsammlung and with generous financial support from the Reydan + Roger Weiss Foundation, is presenting the K21 Global Art Award for the third time. This award is unique in its global approach and is one of the most highly endowed art prizes in Germany. The nominated artists were proposed by an international jury consisting of Doryun Chong, Koyo Kouoh, Omar Kholeif, and Jochen Volz. The 2025 nominees are Sin Wai Kin, Simon Fujiwara, Hashel Al Lamki, Celia Hempton, Sallisa Rosa, and Tadáskía. The museum is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2025 K21 Global Art Award is the Brazilian artist Tadáskía.

Susanne Gaensheimer, Director of K20K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen: “I am delighted that, thanks to the generous financial support of the Friends of the Kunstsammlung and a private donor, we are able to present this important and highly endowed prize again this year. As director of the museum, it is very important to me to expand the museum’s canonical collection with young, diverse, and international positions. I would like to congratulate the winner of this year’s K21 Global Art Award, Tadáskía. I deeply regret that, with the untimely and surprising death of Koyo Kouoh, we have lost an important voice on the K21 Global Art Award nomination jury and a valuable colleague.”

About the Winner
Tadáskía (b. in 1993, Rio de Janeiro) is among the most influential contemporary artists in Brazil and the world today. Her multifaceted practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and apparitions, delving into themes of transformation, self-perception, familiarity, and strangeness, as well as the living narratives of Afro-Transgender-cosmologies.

As part of the K21 Global Art Award, the Friends of K20K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen have acquired Tadáskía’s site-specific installation animated play: travesti moth centipede (2025). The installation is composed of three works: a freely drawn, semi-abstract wall drawing entitled old and new playing rainbow; a poem inscribed on the wall in both English and German entitled kiss me kiss me kiss me when you arrive; and a new series of sculptures made from taboa, bamboo, vegetables, fruits, and liquids entitled arrangement. “It is a mysterious gift to see my work—born around my mother Elenice, speaking to the plants and the stars, and my father Aguinaldo, who taught me to work with constancy—reaching places beyond my familiarity. I am deeply grateful and honored to receive the recognition of the 3rd K21 Global Art Award. I am so excited to see my drawings playing and coming to life in this other part of the world,” says Tadáskía.

Drawing lies at the heart of Tadáskía’s practice. Traces of pastel, spray, graphite, and charcoal become vivid and mysterious signs—each mark an intimate gesture, a whisper from a world between worlds. Her sculptures, crafted from taboa, a reed-like plant traditionally used by Afro-Indigenous communities of Latin America, echo ancestral knowledge through their tactile forms. With this straw-like material, Tadáskía shapes small, twisting sculptures that ripple across the space like arrangements or living creatures, expanding the wall drawing into a kaleidoscopic field of motion and presence. The work weaves together self-perception, imagination, and secrecy, inviting us to question fixed roles and inherited norms—particularly those surrounding gender and visibility.

The acquired work has been exhibited in major international institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2024) and the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023). Tadáskía’s works are held in prestigious public collections such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, the Pinacoteca São Paulo, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Kadist in Paris. As of 2025, her work brings a vital contemporary voice from Latin America into the collection of K20K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

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