Steffen Hildebrand, collector and managing director of G2 Kunsthalle, and Leo Wedepohl, director of G2, presented the Master Student Award 2025 as part of the opening of the M25 Festival of HGB master students. This year's winner is Anna Scherbyna. For her final thesis Scales, she receives the prize money of €10,000 and a workspace for a period of 12 months. The prize was awarded for the ninth time this year.
The artist and filmmaker Anna Scherbyna was born in 1988 in Zaporizhia, Ukraine. She studied painting at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kiev, followed by a master's degree in Expanded Cinema with Prof. Clemens von Wedemeyer at the HGB Leipzig. From 2022 to 2025 Anna Scherbyna was a scholarship holder of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Scales has already received the e-flux Film Award (honourable mention) 2025 and was selected for the New Talents Competition at the 17th edition of the Eastern Neighbors Film Festival in The Hague. Anna Scherbyna's work has been shown in group exhibitions in Leipzig, Berlin and Kiev. She lives and works in Berlin.
The jury statement says: "In her video work Scales, Anna Scherbyna interweaves autofictional personal video recordings with staged scenes and experimental sounds to create a road movie. The landscapes of California are overlaid with memories from the protagonist's childhood in Ukraine. The visual and auditory appropriation of the aesthetics of American B-movies from the 1990s creates a rupture that evokes both familiarity and strangeness. Through the non-linear narrative form, the artists create a fragmentation of the plot that collectively enables a physical and sensual perception of a subjective experience. The protagonist undergoes an unfinished process in which traumatic and pleasurable sensations are subtly, precisely and poetically interwoven."
The members of the 2025 expert jury were: Steffen Hildebrand (Collector and Managing Director G2 Kunsthalle), Dr Marcus Andrew Hurttig (Director Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg), Dr Anika Reineke (Curator Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz), Leo Wedepohl (Director G2 Kunsthalle) and Agnes Wegner (Rector HGB).
Anna Scherbyna's works can be seen until 4 October as part of the M25 Master Student Festival in the basement of the EIGEN+ART Leipzig gallery.
The prerequisite for the application was the successful completion of the master student examination at the HGB in 2025. Works from the fields of book art/graphic design, painting/graphics, photography and media art were submitted. With the foundation of the cross-media and cross-class master student award, the G2 Kunsthalle specifically and directly supports young artists at the beginning of their careers. The aim is to support the development of contemporary art production on site. The prize is awarded once a year to all HGB master students in a given year.