The 2025 Russell and Paula Panczenko MFA Prize exhibition
Corpus: an exhibition by Anamika Singh grows out of Singh’s film Sheetla, which follows the Hindi language daily journal Jan Morcha and its role in reporting the highly contested desecration of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, Faizabad in 1992. The exhibition interrogates the way that archaeology is instrumentalized as a strategy of control and nationalism. Singh’s work underscores the close resemblance between remnants of urban destruction and debris of architectural construction. Corpus asks, “What does it mean for symbols of power and progress to be forged from the debris of violence?”
The Russell and Paula Panczenko MFA Prize is offered annually by the museum in collaboration with the UW–Madison Art Department and offers a unique professional development opportunity for award winners. The selected artist is featured in an exhibition at the Chazen and gains experience throughout the entire process of the project, from collaborating on layout and design to marketing and program development. Selected by an outside juror, the winning artist also receives an honorarium. This year’s juror was Lumi Tan, a curator and writer based in New York City.
Anamika Singh, photo by Agya Salas
About the artist
Anamika Singh (b. India 1995; active New York City and Madison, Wisconsin) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work contends with the contested histories produced by transfers and flows of power and violence. Singh received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and is currently an MFA fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she is working on Corpus, her forthcoming body of work. Singh has taught at Rutgers University-Newark and given guest lectures and talks at institutions such as Architectural Association, The New School, and The Cooper Union. Singh has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, and her work has been exhibited internationally. Singh will begin her doctoral research in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in the fall of 2025.
Curator and writer Lumi Tan, photo by Isabel Asha Penzlien
About the juror
Lumi Tan is a curator and writer based in New York City. She is the curator for the upcoming 2026 Converge45 citywide exhibition in Portland, Oregon and the curator for Frieze Focus New York. She recently served as the Curatorial Director of Luna Luna, a revival of the world’s first art amusement park created by André Heller in 1987 and exhibited in Los Angeles in 2024. Previously, she was Senior Curator at The Kitchen, New York, where she organized exhibitions and produced performances with artists including Kevin Beasley, Meriem Bennani, Gretchen Bender, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autumn Knight, Moor Mother, Sondra Perry, The Racial Imaginary Institute, Tina Satter, Kenneth Tam, Danh Vo, and Anicka Yi. Tan has also held positions at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais, France; Zach Feuer Gallery, New York; and MoMA/P.S.1, New York. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Cura, and numerous exhibition catalogues. She was the recipient of 2020 VIA Art Fund Curatorial Fellowship, and has been visiting faculty at School of Visual Arts, New York, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and Yale School of Art.