CIRCA PRIZE 2025

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.

Adham Faramawy likens London’s parakeets to the city’s migrant histories. “Parakeets remind me that visibility doesn’t always mean belonging,” he explains, speaking to the uneasy presence of communities rendered both seen and unseen. Carlos Martiel confronts systems of power and exploitation. “We act like angels of death, destroying ancestral knowledge and extinguishing species,” he warns, calling for survival before it is too late. Reflecting on racist violence in the UK, Magid Magid says: “As a refugee, I know the edges of places shaped by fear and rejection. Placing a prayer mat where hostility once flared, I perform salah, reclaiming public space as sacred ground.”

Laura Huertas Millán explores ghosts and ruins as ecological allegories. “Ghosts speak what climate collapse cannot,” she reflects, framing memory as environmental witness. Lucy Beech meditates on toxic bodies and radical care, while Farah Al Qasimi uses birds to speak of surveillance, captivity and freedom.

Queer and feminist resistance emerges in the work of SUUTOO, caner teker, Tarek Lakhrissi, Puppies Puppies, and Zobayda, who build speculative futures, choreographies of refusal, and sonic refuges of joy. As teker describes it, “To imagine refuge is to imagine a choreography of survival.”

Others turn to speculation, ritual and myth. Korakrit Arunanondchai merges ghostly technology with performance, Valentin Noujaïm invents cinematic cosmologies, and Thelonious Stokes reimagines Black figuration and spirituality within the Western canon. Meanwhile, artists such as Dan Guthrie, Olukemi Lijadu, and Mati Jhurry work with archives and memory to interrogate colonial legacies and fragile cultural preservation.

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!