Introducing the CIRCA PRIZE 2025 finalists! Throughout September, thirty artists from across the world transform public space into a site of reflection and gathering. Each evening at 20:25 local time, a new work will appear on the Piccadilly Lights in London and on the Limes Kurfürstendamm screen in Berlin. Audiences everywhere can watch online and take part in the Public Vote below.
This year’s prize awards a total of £40,000 to support the next generation of creative visionaries. A jury made up of Björk, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Edward Enninful, Michèle Lamy, Ebony L. Haynes, Alvaro Barrington, Nicoletta Fiorucci, Josef O’Connor, Norman Rosenthal and Catherine Wood will select one artist to receive £30,000 and realise a major new public commission premiering in 2027. A further £10,000 Public Vote Prize, powered by Piccadilly Lights, will go to the artist chosen by audiences worldwide.
From more than one thousand applications across twenty-five countries including Brazil, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, thirty finalists have been selected with the Curators’ Circle made up of Amal Khalaf, Ben Broome and Samantha Ozer. As Broome notes, “making moving image art in 2025 is no easy task and opportunities to have work funded at the level that CIRCA provides are few and far between.” Each finalist presents a work in response to the CIRCA 2025 manifesto REFUGIA, which imagines sanctuaries of care and survival and draws on ecological refuges where life endured through catastrophic climates.
The thirty finalists form what CIRCA Founder and Artistic Director Josef O’Connor describes as “a constellation of urgent voices”. Together they speak across migration, ecology, queer resistance, ritual and memory.
Martiel’s work is characterized as endurance art. His artistic practice uses his own body to draw attention to the embodied experience of Blackness under systems of violence and exploitation worldwide. In his performances, Martiel frequently put himself into challenging situations like piercing his skin with a miniature flagpole flying an American flag, having a pest exterminator spray his body with insecticide, or having a piece of his skin surgically removed and preserved in a gold medal. Thematically, his works explore racism, gender, immigration, and the legacy of European colonialism in the USA.
HOW DOES YOUR SUBMITTED WORK RESPOND TO THE CIRCA 20:25 MANIFESTO?
As human beings, we act like angels of death, destroying ancestral knowledge, ecological niches, and extinguishing species, and also perpetuating poverty, discrimination, and genocide around the world. We have been tyrannized in the name of a global economy that benefits only a handful of people whose purpose in life is to spill rivers of blood, turn existence into a valley of tears, and transform natural paradises into arid deserts. Most current Rulers must be removed from political positions and stripped of their power to see if we can survive as a species before it is too late.
IF AWARDED THE £30,000 CIRCA PRIZE, WHAT 10-MINUTE WORK WOULD YOU CREATE – AND HOW WOULD IT EMBODY THE SPIRIT OF REFUGIA?
For the new commission, I will create a video performance titled “Poder Absoluto”, which explores the relationship between body, objectification, and process. This piece constitutes a critical response from the resistance to the challenging times we are all living in around the world under autocratic, militarized, and despotic governments. This video performance includes the participants of immigrants, people of African descent, Latinos, Women, Muslims, members of the LGBTQIA community, and First Nations, among others. Bodies that are considered minorities and historically marginalized and oppressed in the United States and Europe.
Funding for the CIRCA PRIZE is generated entirely by the #CIRCAECONOMY, a circular model that reinvests proceeds from affordable art sold on CIRCA.ART into new public art commissions, charitable causes, art education and prizes. Since launching in 2020, the initiative has raised over £1 Million, placing artists and communities at the centre of an economy that continually reinvests in the future of art and culture.
The CIRCA PRIZE 2025 winners will be revealed LIVE in Piccadilly Circus on Monday 13 October, with a special 30-minute award ceremony starting at 20:00 BST. Don’t miss it!
(more info here)