Femke Herregraven wins Theodora Niemeijer Prize 2025

The jury of the Theodora Niemeijer Prize 2025 selected Femke Herregraven, an artist on the verge of greater national and international recognition. The jury believes that this prize will help her take a significant next step in her career. It will also strengthen her collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, increasing the visibility of her work to a broader audience in the Netherlands. According to the jury, Herregraven’s work demonstrates exceptional intelligence and ambition, remaining relevant beyond the present moment without becoming overly heavy or inaccessible. In recent years, she has undergone significant artistic development.

The jury consisted of Caroline de Pont (museum De Pont), Zoë Gray (Director of Exhibitions, Bozar, Brussels), Bart Rutten (artistic director, Centraal Museum Utrecht), artist and 2023 TNP winner Sara Seijn Chang (Sara van der Heide), and Andrea Davina (director, Niemeijer Fund Foundation).

Femke Herregraven’s work examines the impact of abstract value systems on landscapes, ecosystems, historiography, and daily life. Her research into the interplay between financial markets, risk, and the physical world forms the basis of her sculptures, drawings, films, and hybrid installations. Over the past decade, she has focused on financial, geological, and climatic self-organizing systems that shape and disrupt daily life. A recurring theme in her work is the financialization of the future as a crisis, which she explores through catastrophe bonds as speculative instruments for redistributing risk and disaster. By weaving together textual, computational, and (non)verbal languages—expressed in imagery, sound, drawings, and speculative fiction—Herregraven reflects on how contemporary future models not only shape our perception of reality but also influence the very foundations on which it rests. Herregraven is an alumnus of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2017–2018) and earned the Creator Doctus title at the Sandberg Institute in 2024. She was shortlisted for the Prix de Rome in 2019 and won the Evens Art Prize in 2023.