BERLIN.- The Kommunale Galerie Berlin is presenting the winners of the 19th IBB Prize for Photography in an exhibition opening February 20 and running through May 10, 2026. This year’s honors go to Jana Pressler, recipient of the main prize, and Moritz Haase, who received the recognition award. Together, their works form a thoughtful dialogue about how photography can reveal the passage of time, the nature of physical reality, and the processes behind image-making itself.
Awarded by Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) in cooperation with the Friends of the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) | Karl Hofer Society, the annual prize supports promising young artists connected to UdK Berlin. Beyond the monetary award—€7,500 for the main prize and €2,500 for the recognition award—the program also funds the exhibition, publications, and presentation of the artists’ work in a professional institutional setting, giving emerging photographers a significant platform at an early stage in their careers.
At the heart of the exhibition are two distinct yet complementary artistic approaches.
Pressler, born in 1997 and currently studying Fine Arts at UdK Berlin, works across installation, sculpture, and analog photography. Her practice challenges the rapid, approval-driven visual culture of social media by focusing instead on how perception is constructed. Through carefully staged spatial arrangements and material processes, she explores the relationship between surface and depth, image and object, and the physical traces left behind by photographic acts. Her work invites viewers to slow down and consider photography not as a fleeting digital image, but as a tangible and process-based medium.
Pressler has already built an international profile, with solo exhibitions in Lienz and Copenhagen and participation in group shows at venues such as the Museum für Fotografie in Berlin, Kunsthalle Aarhus, and the European Month of Photography Berlin. Residencies in San Sebastián and Boden have further shaped her interdisciplinary approach, and her work is now held in the collection of the Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl.
Moritz Haase, born in 1994, approaches photography from a different but equally reflective perspective. Trained at the Lette Verein and currently studying at both UdK Berlin and the Zurich University of the Arts, Haase combines photography with installation, light-based phenomena, and spatial memory. His work examines how reality can be understood through physical processes, often reorganizing images from different times and places to create new relationships and meanings.
By layering moments and locations, Haase constructs visual environments that feel both scientific and poetic, encouraging viewers to reflect on how memory, light, and time shape our understanding of the world. His works have been shown at institutions including KW Institute for Contemporary Art and the Museum für Fotografie in Berlin, as well as in gallery exhibitions across the city.
The IBB Prize for Photography, established in 2007, is open to current students and recent graduates of UdK Berlin who completed their studies within the past five years and are generally under the age of 35. Candidates are first nominated by professors from the university’s Faculties of Fine Arts and Design, after which an independent jury selects the winners. The 2025 jury included curator and journalist Nadine Barth, artist Veronika Kellndorfer, and photographer Jan Sobottka.
By pairing Pressler’s materially driven investigations of perception with Haase’s explorations of light, time, and memory, this year’s exhibition demonstrates the breadth of contemporary photographic practice among Berlin’s emerging artists. More than a simple prize showcase, the presentation offers visitors a chance to see how photography continues to expand beyond the image itself—into space, process, and experience.
