Art Prize of the SPD Parliamentary Group of Lower Saxony: on the jury for the BBK

Having a say

Making art is one thing. Helping to decide about art is something else entirely. This year I got to think both together, as a member of the jury for the Art Prize of the SPD parliamentary group in the Lower Saxony state parliament, sent by the BBK Lower Saxony. Eleven people from museums, academies, art societies and the association, looking together at artistic lives.

A prize for the middle

The prize has been awarded since 1988, the only art prize of a parliamentary group in Germany. This year it was realigned. It now looks at the middle of artistic careers, at those who are no longer newcomers and not yet established. There are grants for emerging artists and honours for a life’s work. In between it is quiet. That is exactly where the prize now comes in.

Leyla Yenirce

The jury’s choice fell on Leyla Yenirce. Born in 1992 in Qubînê in the Kurdish part of Turkey, raised in Oldenburg, based in Berlin today. She paints, builds video installations, composes and performs, and all of it is about resistance and its images. The jury writes: “With her engagement with representations of resistance and power structures she is among the most important artistic voices of her generation.” Until August the Landesmuseum Oldenburg showed her first museum solo exhibition, “Werdegang”.

The art prize in brief

The prize has been awarded since 1988 and is endowed with 5,500 euros. It is the only art prize awarded by a parliamentary group in Germany. A jury of museums, academies, art societies and the artists’ association decides; the parliamentary group has no say on the content. In 2025 the prize went to Rüdiger Stanko, in 2024 posthumously to Anna Jander. The 2026 winner is Leyla Yenirce. The ceremony takes place on October 6, 2026 at the Sprengel Museum Hanover.

In the end there was a name I had not put forward. And I stand behind it.

The prize will be presented on October 6 at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. How such a decision is made, why the association has to sit at the table and who Leyla Yenirce is, I have written up at length in the magazine.