Minority art contest explores belonging, place and loss

The 2025 edition of the International Contest for Minority Artists is open for submissions, inviting artists to explore the powerful themes of belonging, place and loss. This year's contest seeks to highlight the intersection of environmental degradation, cultural loss, and the fight for a just and equitable future rooted in human rights.

Organized by UN Human Rights, Minority Rights Group International, and Freemuse, with the City of Geneva as a key partner, the contest is a core component of the Minority Artists for Human Rights Initiative (2024-2028). This initiative aims to support minority artists as human rights defenders, broaden outreach to diverse audiences and strengthen connections between minority artists and the UN human rights system.

Belonging, Place and Loss

The 2025 theme delves into the complex relationships minorities have with belonging, place, and loss, encompassing their rights and experiences, including in the context of environmental justice and climate change. It also focuses on broader questions of attachment to place, existence, and the loss of community, language, and culture.

Climate change and environmental harm disproportionately affect minority communities, disrupting land, resources, and ecosystems crucial for their livelihoods, according to UN Human Rights. This is further compounded by environmental racism, which places polluting industries and toxic waste sites in minority-dominated areas. A rise in hate speech and stigma can lead to displacement and alienation from a person’s home and culture.

Minority artists play a pivotal role in addressing these issues by articulating and challenging environmental racism and climate-change-related harms, transforming them into powerful forms that can resonate with the public.

The contest aims to celebrate the importance of minority perspectives in understanding the connections between minority rights, human rights, environmental justice and climate action. It also hopes to showcase minority-driven solutions to combat the adverse effects of climate change and environmental harm, while illustrating the minority experience of loss of place and culture.

Submission Details

Artists who identify as belonging to a national, ethnic, religious, or linguistic minority are encouraged to submit high-quality electronic images of up to five artworks related to the 2025 theme. A panel of judges will select three minority artists, groups, or art projects to receive awards, as well as one artist for the Minority Artist Award for Youth.

The final deadline for submissions is 1 March 2025. Applications for the Contest should be submitted on the website of Freemuse.org. Award winners will be announced in November 2025.

The International Contest for Minority Artists began in 2022 and has previously covered the themes of Statelessness (2022) and Intersectionality (2023). Last year’s theme focused on memory in the present and celebrated the creativity and cultural expression of minority artists whose artwork explored themes relating to memory and memorialization around the globe.

“Minority artists, because their art relate to their minority identity and its memorial components, can offer a contrapuntal contribution to the artistic landscape of the countries in which they live,” said Nicolas Levrat, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues.

The award winners from 2024 were visual and plastic artist Bianca Broxton, visual and plastic artist Joel Pérez Hernández, visual artist Francis Estrada, painter and performer Laowu Kuang. Honorable mentions included photographer André Fernandes, musician and creative designer Maganda Shakul and visual and plastic artist and painter Chuu Wai.

The winners and honourable mentions accepted their award during the ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland, 2024. © OHCHR/Irina Popa

From Salvador, Brazil – a city with a rich Black heritage – comes André Fernandes, a Black photographer dedicated to capturing the essence of Black culture and religious life. He is especially known for his intimate documentation of Candomblé rituals within his community.

“Creating conditions for the promotion of Afro-descendant cultural and religious identity and the visibility of these narratives is a way to honor ancestral memories and promote the necessary historical reparations for Black people who, even today, suffer the consequences of the lack of understanding of their religious practices,” he said.

Maganda Shakul, a Ugandan artist from a rural background, seamlessly integrates music production, percussions, and fashion design into his creative output. His art is profoundly shaped by his rich cultural inheritance: his mother's Baganda roots and his father's mixed Bahima and Luo heritage. This upbringing instilled in him a passion for the arts, beginning with traditional percussion, which now forms the basis of his innovative music production, blending traditional rhythms with modern sounds.

“Through my music and fashion, I invite audiences to embark on a nostalgic journey, exploring the collective memories embedded in the traditions, rituals, and stories of my communities,” he said.

Chuu Wai, a Shan artist born and raised in Myanmar, uses her art as a powerful form of expression and resistance. Now exiled in France following the 2021 military coup, she continues to create multidisciplinary works – including paintings, fabric art, collages, and pieces using repurposed media – that subvert expectations of women in Myanmar and explore the country's evolving cultural landscape.

“My acrylic paintings portray strong figured women in controversial and subversive poses using bold brush strokes on colorful fabric patterns which reflect the cultures and historical stories of Myanmar women that connect to the present,” she said. “These artworks weave together history, culture, ethnicity and religion to tell the story of struggle. Much of my work is concerned with fabric, not just as material but a site of social struggle.”