Prince Claus Impact Award Presented to Six Artists from Diverse Disciplines

The Prince Claus Fund announces the six recipients of the second Prince Claus Impact Award: Mu Cao, a self-taught poet and fiction writer based in China; Myrlande Constant, a visual artist from Haiti; Nguyễn Trinh Thi, a filmmaker and artist from Vietnam; Rosa Chávez, a poet and activist from Guatemala; Sana Na N’Hada, a filmmaker from Guinea-Bissau; and Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, also known as crazinisT artisT, a multidisciplinary artivist, curator, mentor, and philanthropist from Ghana.

The Impact Award honours individuals whose contributions to art and culture engage their communities in innovative and impactful ways while addressing urgent contemporary issues. The dedication and commitment demonstrated by this year’s recipients in addressing pressing political concerns deserve global recognition and celebration. With a monetary prize and an emphasis on meaningful social engagement, the Impact Awards stand out as one of the most prestigious recognitions in the realm of arts and culture. The recipients were honoured at the Awards Ceremony held in December at the Royal Palace of Amsterdam.

The recipients have been carefully handpicked by an international jury of five highly inspiring individuals. The Jury members come from a diverse range of backgrounds, disciplines, and localities, bringing a wealth of experience and unique perspectives to the selection process. This year’s jury is led by chair Pablo Leon de la Barra, a curator and researcher based in Mexico. Joining him are Kettly Mars, an awardee novelist and poet based in Haiti; Anocha Suwichakornpong, a filmmaker and screenwriter based in Thailand; Sammi Baloji, a photographer and visual artist based in Belgium; and Avni Sethi, an interdisciplinary practitioner and leader in the South-Asian arts scene based in India. Together, they bring a wealth of diverse perspectives to the selection process, making this year’s winners a truly exceptional group.

About the recipients:

Mu Cao (China)
Mu Cao is a self-taught poet and fiction writer from (the People’s Republic of) China. Described as a “folk poet”, Mu Cao is a precarious worker and one of the few openly gay Chinese poets, often facing censorship and relying on unofficial channels for publishing his work. His poetry is bold, dark and expressive, and his use of language is at once mischievous and serious, provocative and introspective, hilarious and heartbreaking. Mu Cao blends his own life experience with a powerful imagination to document queer life on the underside, telling the stories of rural and working-class gay men living on the margins of society where neoliberal capitalism ruthlessly exploits human labour and demarcates middle-class consumers from a large, underprivileged social group.

Myrlande Constant (Haití)
Myrlande Constant is a visual artist from Haiti, celebrated as one of the first women to work with Vodou drapo, a traditional Haitian flag art, historically practised by men. Born near Port-au-Prince, Myrlande learned embroidery from her mother and began selling her own pieces after leaving her job at a wedding dress factory. Inspired by her father, a Vodou priest, she turned to Vodou drapo in the 1990s, creating intricate, large-scale flags that blend spiritual themes with personal and political narratives.

Nguyễn Trinh Thi (Vietnam)
Nguyễn Trinh Thi is a filmmaker and artist from Vietnam. Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s work delves into the relationships between memory, history, representation, power structures, the legacies of colonialism and war, and the erasure of indigenous Vietnamese cultures. Using a montage technique, she is a pioneer of the moving image medium in Vietnam and incorporates found footage, still images from postcards, photography, newsreels, Hollywood films, and ethnographic footage, alongside her own audio and visual recordings. This convergence of diverse media creates a sense of multiplicity, exploring how we perceive and create images, as well as what remains unshown, unsaid, or unheard.

Rosa Chávez (Guatemala)
Rosa Chávez is a poet and activist from Guatemala, belonging to the K’iche’ Maya people on her father’s side and Kaqchikel Maya on her mother’s side. In her multidisciplinary work that spans theatre, performance, video and music, Rosa explores themes such as family, migration, rural and urban environments, and, most distinctly, the body. When she speaks of the body, Rosa speaks not only of her own physical ways of knowing the world as a Maya K’iche-Kaqchikel woman but also of the collective body from which she comes: her community, motherearth and the generations who have sustained life despite the forces that have attempted to diminish it.

Sana Na N’Hada (Guinea-Bisáu)
Sana Na N’Hada is a filmmaker from Guinea-Bissau. Sana’s filmography spans both documentary and fiction, with works that chronicle the historical and social struggles of his homeland. In 1967, he began studying filmmaking in Cuba, and upon returning in 1972, helped establish the National Film Institute (INCA) in Guinea-Bissau. In a cinematic career spanning more than four decades, Sana has bore witness to the best and the worst times in Guinea-Bissau. He joined Amìlcar Cabral’s revolutionary army in the heady days of the war for independence. In the restive years following self-rule, he set about making evocative films that captured and challenged the prevailing zeitgeist. In 2012, following a military coup in Guinea-Bissau, Sana and his long-term collaborator, Flora Gomes, swiftly collected archival footage and brought it to Berlin for digitization. In 2014, they returned to their homeland to present digitized films.

Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (Ghana)
Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, known as crazinisT artisT is a multidisciplinary artivist, curator, mentor, and philanthropist from Ghana. Raised in a deeply religious community, she initially trained as a teacher and served in Ghana Education Service until 2010 and simultaneously as a pastor in several local churches. At 29, she embarked on a transformative journey, leaving her roles to study art at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, where she earned degrees in painting and sculpture. Despite her formal training in painting and sculpture, crazinisT artisT predominantly developed her practice in the realm of performance.

More information on the Prince Claus Impact Awards, Awardees and Jury Board can be found here.