26th Baloise Art Prize awarded at Art Basel 2025

Basel, 17 June 2025. The Baloise Art Prize has been awarded to Joyce Joumaa and Rhea Dillon. The prize of CHF 30,000.- will be presented at the Statements sector of Art Basel by a jury of international experts. The prize includes the acquisition by Baloise of works by the award winners, which are donated to two important museums in Europe: the MMK Frankfurt and the MUDAM, Luxembourg.

This year’s jury includes: Karola Kraus, General Director MUMOK Vienna, Chair of the Jury; Bettina Steinbrügge, Director MUDAM, Luxembourg; Susanne Pfeffer, Director MMK, Frankfurt; Susanne Titz, Director Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach and Uli Sigg, Swiss Collector and patron of the arts. 

In her installation Periodic Sights Joyce Joumaa highlights the drastic energy crisis in Lebanon, one of the most severe and ongoing infrastructural crises of the country. The work consists of repurposed fuse boxes in which photographs of everyday motives from Beirut and Tripoli are set in: domestic scenes, rows of buildings, market places and urban spaces in-between. Joumaa focuses on how complex power, infrastructure, and social psychology are interwoven. These boxes are illuminated in real time: simulating the daily average power supply of a household in Lebanon – often not more than two hours a day. Thus, making it immediately tangible what it means to live under these structural conditions. Electric power – or rather the lack thereof – becomes a resource of social power. 
The light regulation of the installation is directly connected to the exhibition booth: visitors can experience in real time how the supply of energy is rationalised and how visibility, participation, and exclusion are decided. Whoever can afford a generator or solar panels lives in the light. 

Joyce Joumaa, *1998, lives in Beirut, Lebanon and Amsterdam, Netherlands
Statements Stand M17, Eli Kerr Gallery, Montreal, Canada
 

Rhea Dillons sculptural work shows how she interweaves and roots her work in her Caribbean and British identity. In her piece Leaning Figures, a group of wall-mounted sculptures, she grapples with ethnographic forms of presentation and the question of the origin of Sapele-Mahagony of the African continent and its use in building ships for slavery. How deep the colonial scars run and how difficult it is to detach from them is evident in the sticky molasses to which the seemingly precious crystal plates are stuck to. 

Rhea Dillon, *1996, lives in London, UK
Statements Stand M9, Soft Opening Gallery, London, UK
 

During Art Basel 2025 (17.-22.6.) all the winners will be presented at the Baloise Studio (Hall 2.2).
 

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