The ars viva Prize has been awarded annually since 1953 to young artists living in Germany whose work stands out for its innovative potential and high artistic quality. The recipients of this year’s prize are Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane, and Jumana Manna.

Addressing possible configurations of art and nature, Margit Busch, recipient of the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2016, created a laboratory-cum-experiment that included mealworms and beetles that consume, and thus recycle, polystyrene plastic. By generating insights into the discipline of “transciency,” Busch’s project sheds light on the meeting points of scientific, philosophical, artistic, and practical discourses.

Andrej Polukord, corecipient of the Kunsthalle Wien 2016 prize, draws on painting, installation, performance, and video art to create unpredictable environments and absurd situations that produce double meanings and ambiguity.

Anastasiya Yarovenko, one of the two recipients of the 2015 Kunsthalle Wien Prize, makes work concerned with the body’s relationship to societal structures, behaviors, and space. In her installation Mimicry at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, the Ukrainian-born artist assembled a selection of objects that don’t represent any definitive state but that possess the potential to interact with the viewer or surroundings.

With delicate lyricism, Karina Mendreczky creates fictional landscapes using light and shadow. As one of two recipients of the 2015 Kunsthalle Wien Prize, she created the installation Thin Dream at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz. Silhouettes of acrylic trees, whose details were hand-carved with an etching needle, were projected onto the back wall of the gallery to create the impression of actual large-format drawings.