Foundwork

As we gear up to announce the jury and open call for our 2026 Artist Prize cycle, we’re so proud to share an outstanding Dialogues interview between our 2025 honoree, multidisciplinary artist Antonia Kuo (.kuo), and critic Drew Zeiba ().
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“There’s a sheer glut of images that we live among. The material of our time is images. I work mostly from my personal archive—everything is culled from that or cannibalized. Sometimes I’ll use a photograph over and over in the work, but it always turns out completely differently. It’s about addressing the materiality of images in a time when they’re more and more immaterial, and mining how they can be transformed through this really labor-intensive relationship I have with the process and material,” Kuo tells Zeiba in her Brooklyn studio this spring. Read the full interview at www.foundwork.art/dialogues.
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Kuo received an MFA from Yale University, her BFA from School of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University, and a one-year certificate from the School of the International Center of Photography. Her work has been exhibited at , , and , New York; , Paris; , London; , Portland; , Seattle; , Taipei; and , PH, among others. Kuo has been an artist-in-residence at , Vermont Studio Center, , and was a fellow. Her work is included in collections of , , , and in Nusantara, Indonesia. She lives in New York.
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Drew Zeiba writes fiction and criticism, including recently for , , and . He is a contributing editor to . He lives in New York.
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Pictured here: “Solar Array,” 2025; unique photochemical painting on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper, x-rays, photogram on silver gelatin paper (4 panels)
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Congratulations to —our 2022 Foundwork Artist Prize winner—who opened her solo exhibition “All Great Powers Collapse from the Centre” earlier this year at .
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White’s practice “interweaves maritime mythologies of the Black diaspora with the undoing of hydrarchy through the object that unifies both Blackness and the nation-state: the ship. At the core of the works made for this exhibition is the term ‘shipwreck(ed).’”
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The exhibition, which is open through May 16, expands on themes White and critic discussed in their conversation for our Dialogues program—in particular, the possibilities in a worldview that centers the sea. You can find the interview at https://foundwork.art/dialogues/dominique-white
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Pictured: Dominique White, “All Great Powers Collapse from the Centre,” exhibition view, Kunsthalle Basel, 2026, photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel.
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“Anna Ehrenstein () works from a position she must continuously relocate. Moving between different cultures, across shifting power structures, she has come to understand collaboration not as a romantic ideal but as a matter of honest positioning,” writes theorist and curator Yana Kadykova (.kvs) aboujt the second of three artists she selected from our platform. “Her practice is fundamentally relational, built on the inclusion of people and the reciprocal work of learning from one another. What becomes visible is only ever the surface of something far more layered. Through an opulent material language, she traces and negotiates the flows that circulate between bodies and systems. Permeated by multinational codes, her work unfolds differently depending on who encounters it and from which position. No single interpretation exhausts it.”
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Anna Ehrenstein is an interdisciplinary artist weaving multipolar cosmogony between Berlin, Tirana, and the cloud. She is a professor in the photography department at HGB Leipzig.
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Seen here: “Melody For A Harem Girl By The Sea,” 2023. Work cycle encompasses Assemblage / Painting, Textile works, Lenticular Sculptures and Sculpture with Video Work in Phone. 700 x 800 x 800 in. 4:09.
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“alfatih’s () works require a counterpart. Not in the sense of an audience that observes, but rather a structural prerequisite. The work becomes complete only in the moment of encounter,” theorist and curator Yana Kadykova (.kvs) writes about the first of three artists she selected from our platform. “It is the active passage through the work, the act of engaging with it through specific actions or movement, that sets it in motion. His practice brings people together and breaks down the distance sometimes found in passive contemplation. Guided by expectation and irritation, familiar objects lose their original function and slip into the absurd. There lies its humor, and perhaps that is also where its joy comes from.”
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alfatih lives and works in Switzerland. He has presented interactive, installation and video works in institutions and spaces across Europe and abroad.
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Seen here: “Untitled,” 2025; rotating light box. Photograph Sandra Pointet.
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We’re excited to welcome our latest guest curator—Yana Kadykova (.kvs) who is an art theorist and curator based in Switzerland and Germany. She serves as an Assistant Curator at and holds an engagement as curator at .contemporary in Leipzig. Her practice moves between exhibitions, listening formats, and editorial work, with a sustained focus on migration, language, and the politics of knowledge-making. She researches how different formats–readers, symposia, translation, and text–produce meaning and make contested social experiences discussable. She is currently developing a multilingual reader gathering voices from artists of first and second migrant generations across Europe.
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Yana selected three artists from our platform whose work especially resonated with her: alfatih () , Anna Ehrenstein (), and Tianyi Sun (). Read more about what stands out about each of their practices at www.foundwork.art/guest-curators.
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