03. February 2025
The
University of Applied Arts Vienna and the City of Vienna have awarded the Vanessa Preger McGillivray Prize to Valentin Unger
at the graduation ceremony. The graduate of the photography department at the Institute for Fine and Media Art was honored
for his outstanding diploma project titled “Lieblingshobby Kunst”. In his work, Unger deals with processes of consumption
and appropriation and examines the mediation of art as a remix through appropriation.
The jury praised the work as “concise
in form and content” and particularly emphasized the innovative examination of the medium of the art catalog as an archive
of knowledge and images. “Individual gestures and reproduction meet in his image-text tableaux, which were created in a performative
act with the reflected-light scanner in the library of the Angewandte,” the jury explained.
The Angewandte congratulates!
About the award
The Vanessa Preger-McGillivray Prize was established in January
2021 and is endowed with 3,000 euros. It is awarded annually at the end of the winter semester for an outstanding final thesis
in the field of fine arts. The University of Applied Arts Vienna and the City of Vienna donated this prize in memory of Vanessa
Preger-McGillivray, who was murdered in a terrorist attack in downtown Vienna on November 2, 2020.
She herself had begun
her studies in painting at the University of Applied Arts in October 2020. The prize is intended not only to commemorate her,
but also to underscore the potential of studying art by setting impulses and highlighting the hopes and perspectives of an
artistically fulfilled life.
