Firenze 50124
Italy
This summer, for the Villa Romana Prize 2027, director Elena Agudio and curator and project coordinator Mistura Allison invited the following nominators: Nevin Aladağ, Nora-Swantje Almes, Çağla İlk, Cosmin Costinaș, Nico Anklam, Florence Thurmes, Armin Linke, Rossella Biscotti, Kasia Fudakowski, and Willem de Rooij. The jury responsible for selecting the Villa Romana Fellows 2027 was composed of Ulf Aminde and Kathleen Reinhardt.
We are delighted to announce the recipients of the Villa Romana Prize 2027. Since its inception in 1905, the Villa Romana Prize has been dedicated to supporting artists who expand the horizons of artistic practice.
The four selected artists for 2027 are Arijit Bhattacharyya, Stephanie Comilang, Ligia Lewis, and Li Yong Xiang.
We warmly welcome the following artists as Villa Romana Fellows for 2027:
Arijit Bhattacharyya
Arijit Bhattacharyya is a multidisciplinary artist. In recent years, he has been working on a novel about plant-human interdependent mutations. Within these imagined temporalities, Bhattacharyya engages with real-world right-wing propaganda, nationalism, political incarceration, hate speech, and legitimised state-sponsored violence. For this work, the artist has collaborated with activists, citizen journalists, and independent journalists, often developing publications and videos to create counter-narratives.
Stephanie Comilang
Stephanie Comilang is a Filipina-Canadian artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. With a focus on the migrant experience, Comilang considers the growing disparity between the human and the global. Through a genre she terms “sci-fi documentary,” Comilang creates films whose narratives are driven by multiple voices and points of view, considering how culture and society engage with salient aspects of the globalised world, including mobility, capital, and labour.
Ligia Lewis
Ligia Lewis works as a choreographer and dancer. Her works, often marked by expressions of physical intensity and humour, seek to animate subjects through physical forms of expression that disrupt normative conceptions of the body while negotiating the ghostly traces of history, memory, and the unknown. Through choreography, she develops expressive concepts that give form to movements, speech, affects, thoughts, relations, utterances, and the bodies that hold them. Utilising affect, empathy, and the sensate, her work continues to evoke the nuances of embodiment.
Li Yong Xiang
Li Yong Xiang is a Berlin-based artist whose practice draws on a diversity of media. His main interest, however, lies in the border-crossing intersections between painting, sculpture, music, and video. Influenced by a reciprocal understanding of culture, the artist challenges ideas of sovereignty and existing power structures by engaging in forms of contamination that address media, formal, and cultural specificities.
About the Villa Romana Prize
The Villa Romana Prize is the oldest German art prize. Since its inception in 1905, the history of the prize has been connected with renowned artists and has been dedicated to supporting artistic experimentation and independent practice.
The patron of Villa Romana and founder of the Villa Romana Prize is the registered non-profit association Villa Romana e.V.
The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) has been a main sponsor of Villa Romana since 2021. Further support comes from Deutsche Bank Foundation and BAO Foundation, among others.
