In April 2026, the UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts Karlsruhe (UCCoMA) and the Hoepfner Foundation announced their scholarship for the second time, open to professional freelance media artists living and working in Karlsruhe and the surrounding region. The call sought innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary ideas for media art projects to be developed and exhibited at studio hö during the six-month fellowship period.
Media artist Isabelle Konrad is this year’s fellow at studio hö. She impressed the seven-member jury with her concept FURIE, which was selected from among numerous submissions.
In its statement, the jury wrote:
“The theme of ‘female rage’ is not arbitrary, but necessary. Artist Isabelle Konrad makes it the starting point for a project that convinced the jury in terms of concept, form, and approach.
Despite her emotional investment in the subject, Konrad approaches it with intellectual progressiveness: she explores archetypes of female rage and uses them to develop a constructive force for self-empowerment – rage not as a response to violence, but as a form of agency. Her project FURIE is rooted in a tradition of female iconography; it references existing visual spaces in order to productively reinterpret them, and transforms a socially suppressed emotion into an artistic tool. In times when attacks on women and people perceived as female are on the rise in both physical and digital spaces, and patriarchal structures remain deeply entrenched, we need precisely this anger.
The jury also considered the project’s precise fit with the location to be crucial: The transparency of studio hö’s storefront, situated between KIT and Brunnenstraße, transforms the project into a public gesture. FURIE engages with this symbolically charged space—from research to the chorus of screams—as an ongoing process of making the invisible visible. studio hö becomes a meeting place where women and those socialized as women come together, discuss, and experiment with new forms of female anger.
The multimedia format – photography, video, sound, and performance – aligns perfectly with the scholarship’s focus. Konrad’s experience with performance and media art technologies, as well as her extensive network in Karlsruhe, suggest she will actively engage a diverse audience. In this context, studio hö will serve not only as an exhibition and performance space but also as an intimate photo studio: a place where new portraits and images of female archetypes are created – developed and made visible together. The creation of a long-term visual and audio atlas ensures that FURIE will continue to have an impact beyond the fellowship: as a growing archive of female rage that emerges through the creative process and remains accessible to the audience.”
Isabelle Konrad’s project includes numerous workshops; the first one will take place on June 28, 2026, and will focus on the Anger Archive, in which participants will explore how angry women have been portrayed in art history, pop culture, and the media to date.
Her first exhibition, Die Furien sind da [The furies are here], opens on August 11 at 7 p. m. and is part of the exhibition Media Art Is Here, which runs from August 13 to September 13, 2026.
Please find further information and dates regarding the program here.
