press: Joschua Yesni Arnaut receives free travel grant

Joschua Yesni Arnaut has been awarded this year’s Freies Reisestipendium from AIR_Frankfurt & Offenbach. The grant supports his independent travel and research project to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Arnaut will explore, among other things, the traditional woodcarving practices of Konjic.

His research will examine the relationship between family memory, cultural heritage, and the ruptures caused by war and migration, and how these experiences are inscribed in both. The project is scheduled to be realised by the end of 2027.

The Freies Reisestipendium is part of AIR_Frankfurt & Offenbach’s programme supporting international exchange between artists based in Frankfurt am Main and Offenbach and art and cultural institutions worldwide.

Joschua Yesni Arnaut (*1989) works across photography, sculpture and installation, often incorporating text and performative strategies. His practice explores identity as a shifting construction, bringing personal experience into dialogue with masculinity, power and vulnerability. Through exaggeration and self-reflection, he examines the tensions between intimate experience and collective ideas of the self. Arnaut studied with Heiner Blum and Mike Bouchet at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, graduating with distinction in 2023. Selected distinctions include: Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes; Frankfurter Künstlerhilfe Award; finalist for the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship.