C/O Berlin Talent Award 2026
C/O Berlin is pleased to announce the winners of the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2026 with the thematic focus Body Politics. The winner in the Artist category is Amin Yousefi (b. 1996, Iran). His outstanding work Defensive Readiness: Revised Version will be presented in a solo exhibition at C/O Berlin in Amerika Haus from Feb 13 to Jun 2, 2027.
The Short List 2026 includes the artists Nicolás Bernal (b. 2000, Colombia), Debora Brune (b. 1996, Germany), Bimal Fabbri (b. 1993, Nepal), and Ashley McLean (b. 1996, USA).
The C/O Berlin Talent Award 2026 in the Writer category goes to Maxi Wallenhorst (b. 1993, Germany). She will contribute a theoretical essay examining the winning project and situating it within the broader discourse on body politics. Together with an interview with the artist, the essay will be published in a monograph released by C/O Berlin on the occasion of Amin Yousefi’s first solo exhibition.
In a moment shaped by political unrest and anxieties around borders, surveillance, and bodily autonomy, Amin Yousefi’s project Defensive Readiness: Revised Version (2025) examines how systems of power are enacted through the body. Combining photography with diagrammatic line drawings and mapped gestures, Yousefi traces how visual languages of state control are circulated, learned, and embodied. The jury was particularly compelled by the way in which Yousefi mobilized the material to foreground the ongoing ramifications of state violence, exposing how systems of control are absorbed into forms of social conditioning.
Amin Yousefi (b. 1996, Iran) is a London-based writer, curator, and image-based artist. A native of Abadan in Khuzestan, an oil-rich region shaped by the Iran-Iraq war and its aftermath, Yousefi’s work examines photography and archives through their social and political dimensions, focusing on how images shape knowledge, power, and embodied experience in Southwest Asia. Working across photography, text, and installation, he engages archival material through processes of reconstruction and reconfiguration. He is a recipient of the Royal Photographic Society Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam; Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen; and Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Frankfurt am Main.
In her research and art criticism, Maxi Wallenhorst explores issues of gender, body, and power. She creates unexpected, productive connections between anecdotic observations about the present and complex theoretical discourse. Wallenhorst’s critical investigation of the global crisis of masculinity expands on the topics of Amin Yousefi’s Defensive Readiness: Revised Version. What the two works have in common is their exploration of the disciplining of the body through authoritarian systems, ideology, and public authority.
Maxi Wallenhorst (b. 1993, Germany) is a writer based in Berlin. She’s a doctoral researcher at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, where she’s working on forms of the impersonal in queer and trans poetics. Her research interests include psycho-analysis, Marxism and aesthetic theory. She’s working on a novel. Recently, texts have appeared in Berlin Review and in e-flux journal.
The jury, consisting of Veronika Epple (curator, C/O Berlin), Sophia Greiff (co-head of program / curator, C/O Berlin), Marit Lena Herrmann (curator, Fotoarsenal Wien), Julia Hürner (Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, nonvoting), Tarrah Krajnak (photographer), Anna-Sophie Springer (curator and publisher, K. Verlag), and Bindi Vora (senior curator, Autograph London), selected this year’s Artist winner and short list. More than five hundred international emerging artists from sixty-seven countries submitted their work.
The jury for the Writer position, consisting of Veronika Epple (curator, C/O Berlin), and Moshtari Hilal (artist, curator, and author), unanimously selected the winner from a large number of international submissions.
In his continuing project Zero Feathers (2025), Nicolás Bernal (b. 2000, Colombia) processes autobiographical experiences of violence, marginalization, and heteronomy that he has experienced within a Colombian context as an Indigenous, queer person. The springboard for his project is the memories of the stigmatization of his “feminine”-interpreted appearance that shaped his relationship to his own body at an early age. In photographic interventions in his family archive, he juxtaposes historical image material with staged self-portraits in order to rewrite his memories. While the archive images are interspersed with colonial, military, and religious power structures, the photographs open up a view of the body as a place of caring, healing, and self-empowerment.
In her series UNCOOL (2026), Debora Brune (b. 1996, Germany) brings together portraits of people with visible and invisible impairments. In doing so, she focuses the gaze on bodies that are underrepresented in public visual spaces—such as fashion, commercial photography, and social media. Using her own perspective as a wheelchair user as her starting point, she challenges conventional concepts of what types of bodies are considered standard or attractive. The subjects of her photographs have a strong, often cool, presence, revealing individual forms of expression and undermining conventional attributes. Impairments are not hidden but staged as a self-evident part of identity and self-esteem.
The project Outsiders Within (2022–ongoing) by Bimal Fabbri (b. 1993, Nepal) examines the complexity of his identity as a transnational adoptee. Born in Nepal, he was orphaned at age seven and adopted by an Italian family in Milan. Fabbri’s photographs are a poetic meditation on the meaning of family and belonging where blood, race, ethnicity, culture, and language is turned upside down and inside out. The photographs display multiple approaches to the photographic medium and avoid straightforward documentation. In this way, a viewer can feel the depth of questioning in the series, and the ongoing search to understand what it means to be an outsider in one’s own skin.
In the series Seeking You in Other Bodies . . . (2020–24), Ashley McLean (b. 1996, USA) negotiates body politics through an atmosphere of subtle, almost suspended tenderness. The young men photographed here are staged in ways that make vulnerability, touch, and self-possession palpable without turning them into spectacle. Against the persistent stereotype of Black masculinity as hardened, threatening, or emotionally unavailable, Ashley McLean’s portraits tune in to softness as a form of presence and resistance. Both deeply poised and undefended, what the photographer nurtures is a contemplative counter-image: one in which Black fatherhood, masculinity, skin, solitude, and care are allowed to breathe.
