9 December 2024

Ellen Auerbach Fellowship for Photography 2024 goes to Ilit Azoulay

The Akademie der Künste is awarding the Ellen Auerbach Fellowship for Photography 2024 to Ilit Azoulay. The Israeli artist works at the intersection between photography, fine art and sound art. The fellowship for outstanding international photography, endowed with 20,000 euros, is financed from the estate of photographer Ellen Auerbach and awarded biannually. Auerbach’s estate is held in the Akademie der Künste. The fellowship will be awarded on 28 February 2025 at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg.

Ilit Azoulay was selected by curator and cultural scientist Hubertus von Amelunxen, photographer Harf Zimmermann (both Akademie members) and the photo-historian Franziska Schmidt. In their jury statement they write: “Ilit Azoulay is being honoured for her subtle, kaleidoscopic work, which uses photography in its original and genuine sense, to reveal the optically unconscious, to enlighten. Her archive consists of photographs of the state of reality, which she collects and places in the context of new layers of action, thereby rendering irrelevant the boundary between what is found and what is arranged. Her works are factual representations that simultaneously generate poetic imaginations, seemingly valid and irrefutable in their own right.”

Ilit Azoulay was born in Jaffa in 1972 and has her roots in Morocco. She studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Today she lives in Berlin. In her large-format tableaux, she assembles photographs together with artefacts from endangered archives into new contexts, thereby questioning conventional historical images and revealing cultural layers. Her works are based on an intensive engagement with archival and curatorial practice as a colonial and gender-specific power structure. The transitional element between art and research is what characterises her work.
In 2022, Ilit Azoulay presented the exhibition “Queendom” at the Israeli pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including the Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon (2022), the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018) and the show “Being: New Photography 2018” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. As of 12 December 2024, the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich will be showing the exhibition “Ilit Azoulay. Stopover“. Additional solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her work, including the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2024), the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2020), Tate Britain, London (2019), and the Kunsthalle Basel (2019). Her works are also represented in numerous collections such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf/Berlin, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Ellen Auerbach Fellowship holders of recent years have been Joanna Piotrowska (2022), Ferhat Bouda (2020), Annette Frick (2018), Stephanie Kiwitt (2016), Julian Röder (2014), Natalie Czech (2012) and Anastasia Khoroshilova (2010). The Ellen Auerbach Fellowship holders are members of the JUNGE AKADEMIE circle.

Event information
Presentation of the Ellen Auerbach Fellowship for Photography 2024 to Ilit Azoulay
Friday, 28 February 2025, 7 pm, free admission
Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
Welcome address: Helke Misselwitz, Director of the Film and Media Arts Section, Hubertus von Amelunxen (laudation), conversation with Maren Lübbke-Tidow and the award winner
The award ceremony will take place in the context of the Opening Days of EMOP Berlin – European Month of Photography. Ilit Azoulay and her sound work Heart to Heart are part of the main festival exhibition “what stands between us. Photography as a Medium for Chronicling” of the EMOP Berlin – European Month of Photography.