DAAR Wins Storefront's Inaugural Kyong Park Prize

The prize, launched in May 2024, is named for Kyong Park, the visual artist who founded the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York in 1982. Park said upon the launch that “the past is great, but the future is more desperate and in need of fearless ideas.” Accordingly, the prize named in his honor awards $25,000 to a selected individual, collective, or firm so they can “continue expanding their practice and provide a safety net as they embark on bold new projects.” The prize was created under Storefront director José Esparza Chong Cuy, followed a two-year nomination and review process, and was juried by Negar Azimi, Thomas Keenan, Manuela Moscoso, Marina Otero Verzier, Eugenie Tsai, and Mabel O. Wilson.

Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti describe their two-decades-old practice as situated “between architecture, art, pedagogy and politics.” With this description and their name, which puts decolonization, a now familiar term in architectural academia, out front, DAAR is clearly aligned with the ethos of Storefront and Park. Based in Sweden and Palestine, DAAR addresses spatial and territorial injustices through research, design, pedagogy, and public engagement, producing texts, exhibitions, installations, and events. Notable projects singled out by the Storefront include Refugee Heritage, a nomination dossier for the inscription of Dheisheh Refugee Camp as a UNESCO World Heritage Site; Al Madafeh/Living Room, an ongoing performance at different locations in Europe and the Middle East; and Concrete Tent, a paradoxical construction most recently staged at the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial.

The Kyong Park Prize for Art and Architecture is hardly the first accolade for Hilal and Petti. A year ago, DAAR received the 2025 RIBA Charles Jencks Award, which is given by Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House and the Royal Institute of British Architects to “an individual (or practice) who has recently made a major contribution simultaneously to the theory and practice of architecture.” Two years earlier, at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, the duo's Ente di Decolonizzazione — Borgo Rizza won the Golden Lion for the Best Participant in The Laboratory of the Future, the international exhibition curated by Lesley Lokko, “for their long-standing commitment to deep political engagement with architectural and learning practices of decolonization in Palestine and Europe.” 

DAAR will receive the inaugural Kyong Park Prize for Art and Architecture at a lecture and ceremony on June 27 in Borgo Rizza, in Carlentini, Sicily, coinciding with the Annual Gathering of the Entity of Decolonization (June 22–27), “a long-term site of decolonial practice initiated by DAAR,” per the Storefront, “set within a semi-abandoned former fascist rural settlement built in 1940 by the regime through the Ente di Colonizzazione del Latifondo Siciliano, now reoriented through processes of collective use and critical conservation.”