Period (opening hours):Tue–Sun, public holidays 11 am – 5 pm
Venue:Museum für Angewandte Kunst Gera
Greizer Str. 37
07545 Gera
Partner:The project is funded by SV SparkassenVersicherung, Sparkasse Gera-Greiz and the Thuringia Cultural Foundation.
HGB artists Raisan Hameed and Benjamin Friedle are among the winners of this year’s Aenne Biermann Prize for Contemporary German Photography. From the portfolios of a total of 548 applicants, the jury for the 15th edition of the prize selected five entries to be presented in the exhibition. The selected and award-winning works address current political and social issues.
Raisan Hameed has been honoured for his work *After Image *. He successfully completed his Master’s degree at the HGB in 2025 and currently holds a freelance contract in the field of photography. *After Image* combines a digital archive of Google Street View images of Iraq with a personal family archive, examining in particular visual gaps, distortions and fragmentation: The pixelated faces and destroyed panoramas in Street View are juxtaposed with photographs from the family archive that were damaged during the war in 2003. They thus become traces of war and technological control, illustrating how visibility is both created and restricted. The work interprets the images as ‘after-images’, in which bodies no longer appear as stable representations, but as fragile traces, shaped by memory, violence and technology.
Benjamin Friedle has received an Honourable Mention from the jury for his work *Words from Images from Photos from Forms *. He has been studying in Heidi Specker’s photography class at the HGB since 2025. The award-winning work examines how artificial intelligence is blurring the boundaries between the digital and real worlds of imagery, and how photography, as an omnipresent language, shapes our perception. Through an interplay of text, image and object, the work explores how algorithmic processes, simulation and storage structures have become central components of contemporary image production.
The Museum of Applied Arts in Gera awards the Aenne Biermann Prize for contemporary German photography every two years. The prize commemorates the photographer Aenne Biermann, who was born in Goch in 1898 and lived in Gera from 1920 onwards, whilst also honouring outstanding contributions to contemporary photography.
