Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg

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Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg

A biennial incentive supporting emerging European talents in the field of contemporary art. The prize was first awarded in 2005.

The Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg is a tribute to the life and work of Edward Steichen, born in Luxembourg in 1879. The prize honors Steichen's artistic achievements as a photographer and curator, as well as his commitment to advocating the arts and nurturing new talent. The Award was created in 2004 to mark the 125th anniversary of Edward Steichen's birth in Bivange, Luxembourg. The official announcement was made by Luxembourg Minister of Culture, Higher Education and Research, Mr François Biltgen, on January 24th 2005 in Clervaux, coinciding with the anniversary of another remarkable event: the opening of Steichen's milestone exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, in 1955. It will be bestowed for the 4th time on November 24th 2011. The Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg is conceived as a cross-cultural, artistical and educational bridge between Luxembourg and New York, the city which would become the home of Edward Steichen.

12/10/2026

In 2005, Su-Mei Tse became the first recipient of the Edward Steichen Award, nominated by Marie-Claude Beaud, then Director of Mudam Luxembourg.

Born in Luxembourg, trained as a classical cellist and later in visual arts in Paris, Tse works across video, sculpture, photography, and installation. Sound, rhythm, and silence are not added elements in her practice but starting points. Her breakthrough came in 2003 with the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for the Luxembourg pavilion.

Her current exhibition Blue Monday is on view at Galerie Tschudi in Zurich through October 31, 2026. The show brings together new and existing works that move between music, memory, and vulnerability, from variations on a New Order record cover to a rake conceived as a musical instrument, and three red megaphones from which only the faint crackle of a record can be heard.

Photos:

ISCP The Estate of Edward Steichen

05/10/2026

In 2007, Etienne Boulanger received the 2nd Edward Steichen Award, nominated by Corinne Charpentier, then Director of centre d'art contemporain - la synagogue de Delme in Delme, France.

Over nearly a decade, Boulanger worked within the hidden and neglected spaces of rapidly transforming cities, Berlin, Tokyo, Beijing, New York. He located gaps and residual zones and occupied them temporarily, through installations that were camouflaged, clandestine, and set up entirely on site. His work did not represent or reproduce objects. It cast a quiet criical look at the urban environments we move through without questioning.

Etienne Boulanger was born in 1976 and passed away in October 2008 in New York, during his residency there. His work continues to be preserved and shared by the Association Etienne Boulanger.

© Etienne Boulanger

ISCP The Estate of Edward Steichen

25/09/2026

Clio Van Aerde is in residency at Casino Display in Luxembourg from early September to late October, two months in total, developed in collaboration with University of Luxembourg. Once a week, she meets with researchers at the university to exchange ideas, and will also be giving a talk there in the coming weeks.

Her starting point is Rebecca Solnit’s essay “The Treadmill,” from her book Wanderlust, which Van Aerde first read during her residency in New York. The essay looks at what is lost, physically and mentally, when walking and bodily effort are replaced by machines.

From there, Clio Van Aerde is shaping a research project expected to unfold over several years, looking at the body, time, and public space, and at what changes when movement, rhythm, and attention are increasingly shaped by technology rather than by the body itself. The research is still taking form, and its different strands will keep shifting as she works.

ISCP The Estate of Edward Steichen

17/09/2026

In 2009, Bertille Bak received the 3rd Edward Steichen Award, nominated by Laurent Busine, Director of the Musée des Arts Contemporains du Grand Hornu in Belgium.

Her practice is built around specific communities at moments of rupture, groups facing displacement, disappearance, or exploitation. Working from within, she develops participatory videos and installations together with the people she meets, finding new ways to tell their stories without speaking for them.

In Abus de souffle (2024), produced at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, Bak collaborated with the last artisan making bellows in the province of Tétouan, Morocco, a craft known as “Rabouz” on the verge of extinction. The work looks at what gets lost when global economies absorb local trades, and at the fragile connections that hold distant worlds together.

ISCP The Estate of Edward Steichen

09/09/2026

Since 2018, Marianne Villière has been developing Liquid-gym, a project she first presented at the Kolla festival in Luxembourg.

The work takes the form of workshops built on exercises that go against physical effort. Participants are asked to feel liquid rather than solid, and to focus on the inside of the body rather than its performance.
Marianne Villière has carried the project forward over the years, adapting it to different places and groups. The result stays consistent across contexts: a group dynamic that is both poetic and critical, a subjective research process built on soft resistance.

Be water, my friend.

Marianne Villière has put together a longer recap of her time in New York, including this project, on her website (link in our story): http://mariannevilliere.net/prix-edward-steichen/

Photos from a Liquid-gym session during Villière’s residency in New York.

ISCP The Estate of Edward Steichen

31/08/2026

Fifteen years ago, Claudia Passeri, born in 1977 in Luxembourg, received the Edward Steichen Luxembourg Resident in New York award, in 2011. She was the first artist to hold this residency, spending four months at ISCP in New York.

Claudia Passeri creates site-specific interventions and contextual works that examine how people perceive and relate to a place. Depending on the site and context, her work takes on social, political and environmental dimensions, often using irony to reveal the mechanisms that shape how we see the world.

Silent Hero was created for the group exhibition Freigeister at Mudam Luxembourg. The piece takes its form from a tie rod key, an element of ironwork used in masonry to bind the structural parts of a building together. Placed directly on the floor, the anchor-shaped sculpture makes visible what usually holds things together unseen.

Mudam ISCP The Estate of Edward Steichen

24/08/2026

More than ten years ago, Maria Loboda, born in 1979 in Krakow, Poland, received the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg, in 2012.

Maria Loboda creates carefully composed environments that draw on poetic, historical and philosophical research. Her work examines how objects and symbols communicate beyond their conventional meanings, combining material and language in ways that are both precise and open-ended.

In the summer of 2022, she presented The Year of Living Dangerously at Art Basel Parcours, along the Rhine riverbank near the Wettsteinbrücke in Basel, curated by Samuel Leuenberger. The installation staged what appeared to be a capsized cargo of sculptures, replicas of iconic works by Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Jean Dubuffet and Jeff Koons, scattered across the pebbled strand of the river, washed by the current and bleaching in the sun.

The work was neither a mockery nor a provocation, but an invitation to think differently about objects that are usually fixed in place and shielded from time. Loboda replicated the sculptures at full scale, returning them to a state of openness and slow change.

ISCP The Estate of Edward Steichen

19/08/2026

The award ceremony of the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg is just around the corner, marking the close of another two-year cycle supporting emerging European artists.

The new laureates will be announced on the night, continuing a partnership between Luxembourg and New York that goes back to 2005, through a residency at ISCP.

Our newsletter keeps you close to this journey. Discover the residents’ projects, follow their paths between Luxembourg and New York, and read exclusive interviews.

Subscribe via the link in our bio or here www.tinyurl.com/subscribeESAL

Photos: © Marianne Villière, © Clio Van Aerde

ISCP The Estate of Edward Steichen

10/08/2026

Michèle Walerich is a curator whose work spans exhibitions, collections, research and writing, focused on decorative arts, design and visual culture.

She recently joined the Department of Decorative Arts at the Musée national d’archéologie, d’histoire et d’art (Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart), where she co-curated the exhibition ‘Vu Lilien a Linnen’, on the interwoven and porous fields of Arts and Crafts in Luxembourg at the turn of the twentieth century. Previously she was Head of Photography at the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA - Centre national de l'audiovisuel), where she curated exhibitions including ‘The Bitter Years – Steichen Collections’.

ISCP The Estate of Edward Steichen

07/08/2026

Clément Minighetti is part of this year’s jury for the Edward Steichen Award. He joined Mudam Luxembourg in 2000, became Curator of the Collection in 2004, and led the museum’s exhibition program as Chief Curator from 2007 to 2024.

Recent exhibitions he has curated include Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Fly In League With The Night (2022), Rayyane Tabet’s Trilogy (2023), and, as associate curator, Cosima von Bonin’s Songs for Gay Dogs (2024). Since June 2024, he has been working as an independent curator based in Luxembourg.

NYC ISCP The Estate of Edward Steichen

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