Recipients 2026

Rafiki’s interdisciplinary artworks move between photography and bead work, textiles and text, and the use of memorial objects old and new. Rather than producing finished products as an end result, Rafiki treats art-making as a practice of remembrance, healing, and cultural analysis. Incorporating symbolisms, fables, and tools of visual storytelling and oral history, she invokes themes of forced migration and war ghosts, racialized perceptions of Blackness and femininity, and fraught colonial traditions ofspatial power and temporal erasure.

Rafiki is the founder of Oslo-based platform Rafiki Art Initiatives (RAI).

Photo: Ina Wesenberg, Nasjonalmuseet.

Apolonija Šušteršič is a visual artist, architect, researcher, and teacher. Her research-based practice is situated across different fields of spatial practice and critical theory. She works on projects that foster cooperation among people or groups. She would create processes for engagement and platforms for action that enable people to reconnect with their sense of agency by engaging with space and place.

She has a PhD in Performing and Visual Art from Lund University, Malmö Art Academy. Her professional experience includes three international professorships at renowned institutions, including the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, the Royal College of Art, London and the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. She works as an independent researcher in the field of artistic research and collaborates on several research projects across academia, focusing on social and spatial justice.

She participated in a number of internationally published and exhibited projects within and beyond contemporary art institutions around the world, such as Moderna Museet Stockholm, Berlin Biennale 2, Luxembourg City of Culture, Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, Marian Goodman, Paris, 12th Architecture Biennale, Venice, Artes Mundi 5, Gwangju Biennial 2016, Timișoara Biennial 2019, and Diriyah Biennial 2024, among many others.

Image: Antonella Vitale, visiting Palestine, 2017