The SAR Executive Board and the RC Prize Jury are excited to announce the shortlist for the Annual SAR Prize for Excellent Research Catalogue Exposition.

The prize recognises outstanding expositions published in the Research Catalogue, highlighting innovative and critically engaged approaches to artistic research. Each year, the nominated projects reflect a wide range of practices and methods, offering insight into current directions in the field.

We would like to thank everyone who submitted nominations, as well as the jury for their careful and dedicated work in the selection process.

The winner will be announced at the 2026 International Forum on Artistic Research in Galway, taking place from 23–26 June 2026.

Exposition by Annika Borg:

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3227708/3800485

A dice roll is the very image of randomness. Every day since September 1, 1994, I have rolled a set of six dice, written down the number combinations and collected the numerical material in an ever-growing physical archive. (...)

Exposition by Elina Koivisto:

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3240224/3432746 

This practice-led research exposition by architect-researcher Elina Koivisto explores how conducting architectural practice through the framework of feminist spatial practice can provide possibilities for un-learning harmful habits and reaching towards uncertain speculative futures. (...)

Exposition by Live Maria Roggen and Ingfrid Breie Nyhus:

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1732861/3063699

The explorations have concerned creative interpretation and aesthetical language, through improvising together as a duo: What can an interpretation be or become? Where does a story live? What is Romantic and what is unRomantic? Where does the ‘new’ begin and where does the ‘old’ go? (...)

Exposition by Monica Tușinean:

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2829981/3316740

The long-neglected industrial wastelands of Romania present themselves as heterotopias in need of help. Post-Communist industrial ruins form a link to a multi-layered and difficult past, and their systemic erasure has contributed to a collective amnesia that perpetuates historical trauma and denies the local population access to the landscapes, natural and artificial, (...)

Exposition by Julia Weber and Mayumi Arai:

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3866465/3996774

The artistic intervention "Foot Baths for All" (2024) emerged from an ethnographic exploration of collective forms of life on wastelands in Switzerland. Ethnographic insights regarding self-organized care, occupation, informal infrastructure, gift economies, and the shared use of water and electricity were fictionalized and recontextualized in the inner city of Zurich, (...)