2026 Fellowships Awarded
We are pleased to introduce the 2026 fellows of the GUI | IUG:
7th Günther Uecker Research Fellowship
This year’s fellowship of the Günther Uecker Institute has been awarded to a research project by art historian Claudia Kudinova. Under the working title “On Light.” Light and Perception in the Work of Günther Uecker and Their Mediation in the Museum Context, the project is dedicated to an in-depth exploration of art mediation perspectives on the work of Günther Uecker. This year, the fellowship is being carried out in cooperation with the Staatliches Museum Schwerin (State Museum Schwerin).
Claudia Kudinova is an art and visual historian specializing in the postwar avant-garde and contemporary art. She is currently pursuing a PhD on the painterly work of Hal Busse, supported by a fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Since April 2024, she has also been an associated research member and doctoral researcher of the interdisciplinary Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity. Object Space Agency” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 2023/24 and again in 2025, she held teaching appointments at the university’s Institute of Art and Visual History. In addition to her role as director of Galerie Volker Diehl, Kudinova is also active as a curator, both within and beyond the gallery context.
2nd Research Fellowship of the Institute for Environment & Design
The fellowship, through which the Institute for Environment & Design supports projects in the field of artistic research, has this year been awarded to a project by Swedish artist and researcher Åsa Sonjasdotter. The project bears the working title Accessing Historical Time Scales: New Pathways for Sensory and Social Relations Between Breeding and Cultivation in Uniformly Shaped Landscapes.
Åsa Sonjasdotter is an artist, researcher, and writer who lives on the island of Ven, Sweden, and in Berlin. Her work explores the social, political, and cultural relationships surrounding cultivated plants, agriculture, and food systems. Her practice is informed by her experience of the industrialized agricultural landscapes of southern Scandinavia and her long-standing engagement with peasant knowledge and agroecological practices. In 2024, she received her PhD in artistic practice from HDK-Valand at the University of Gothenburg with the dissertation Towards Peasant Cultivation of Abundance.