XR-History Award 2026

Digital tools reshape our understanding of history and the way we remember and preserve the past. They allow us to challenge dominant narratives, bring previously unheard voices to the forefront, and expand opportunities for collective memory. While historians and their books have long shaped the most visible spheres of history-telling and commemoration, new forms of digital storytelling and immersive media offer their own possibilities to experience, question, and reinterpret the past.

Have you created an XR project that skillfully combines elements of contemporary art, narration, and a historical topic or theoretical contribution that creates links between past, present, and future in order to achieve a critical reflection on historic discourses and memory culture/memory-making?

We are looking for an extraordinary XR project that uses new media to explore history, historical narration, and commemorative culture.

Submissions are open from 16 December 2025 until 1 February 2026

We are interested in addressing events or figures from the past, structures of violence, oppression, and injustice rooted in history and still shaping intercultural relations, as well as new digital methods of archiving and remembrance. Today, when multidirectional memory culture is under threat, we explicitly welcome projects that evoke solidarities between communities with intergenerational traumas.

We explicitly welcome diverse and cross-media formats and approaches – artistic, narrative-shaped, or experimental – that engage with gaming aesthetics and understand XR as a method of connecting worlds: digital and analogue, past, present and future, and beyond.

For the third edition of the award, we collaborate with A MAZE. / Berlin 2026 – 15th International Games and Playful Media Festival. The winning project will be rewarded with 2.000 EUR during the A MAZE. Festival in Berlin. The three best projects will be exhibited at the festival, and representatives will be invited (travel and accommodation covered) to take part in the festival.

Our jury will determine the winner.

The winning project will be celebrated on 15 May 2026 at the A MAZE. Festival.

Margarete Jahrmann is an artist, artistic researcher and professor for Experimental Game Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 2025 she was awarded the Österreichischen Kunstpreis Medienkunst. She curates and leads artistic research projects such as The Psycholudic Approach: Exploring Play for a Viable future or ROBOPSY. An Artistic Exploration of Collective Memory through Role-Playing with AI Language Models on AI and e-commemoration.

Max Czollek is an author and co-editor of the magazine Jalta – Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart (Yalta – Positions on Jewish Contemporary Life) and curator of the Coalition for a Pluralistic Public Discourse (CPPD) for a pluralistic memory culture. Since 2023, he has been moderating the discussion series „heimaten“ at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. In 2024, he was DAAD Distinguished Chair in Contemporary Poetics at New York University, NYU. His poetry collections are published by Verlagshaus Berlin, his essays by Carl Hanser Munich.

Vanessa Amoah Opoku is a German-Ghanaian interdisciplinary artist exploring history, digitality, and marginalized narratives through mixed realities. Her world-making practice constructs alternative epistemological frameworks that challenge conventional notions of innovation and future visions. Opoku is part of the artist collective PARA, which uses an interdisciplinary, research-based and performative approach to explore various phenomena of globalization and politics of memory.

The XR-History Award is a biennial award initiated by Körber-Stiftung’s eCommemoration programme, honouring projects using immersive technology to explore artistic approaches to history-telling, history education, and commemorative culture.

First awarded in June 2022 in collaboration with VRHAM! Virtual Reality & Arts Festival, the second edition has taken place in cooperation with Hamburg’s leading contemporary art space, Deichtorhallen. The XR-History Award is currently the only digital arts award that explicitly addresses and encompasses digital projects interweaving past, present, and future.