On 18 October 2026, at Kulturhuset Café Amanda in Höganäs, southern Sweden, Bogdan Szyber was awarded the Lars Vilks Stipend for Artistic Freedom and Freedom of Expression. The award was presented by Krister Thelin, chair of the Lars Vilks Memorial Foundation.

From the foundation’s citation:

For almost fifty years Bogdan Szyber has made art out of reality, and subjected reality to art.

Within the wide frame of the performance tradition he has consistently pushed his artistic visions to their furthest point, without regard for the consequences — whether that meant paying people to work as beggars in central Stockholm, or writing a doctoral thesis in artistic research that questions the very system in which it was produced.

This is a body of work marked by integrity and courage, in the spirit of Lars Vilks. In Szyberspace, nobody cares about those who scream.

Szyber closed the afternoon with a talk of his own, The Journey into Szyberspace.

Programme, Sunday 18 October 2026

• 15.00 Welcome — Krister Thelin, chair, the Lars Vilks Memorial Foundation
• 15.05 Hedvig Weibull, Destabilising Reality: a study in longing, doubt and revolt. Weibull is an art critic and culture journalist writing for SVT, Swedish Radio and Kunstkritikk, among others.
• 15.30 Conny Blom, Consensus: Apples and Class in Contemporary Art. Blom is an artist, art historian, teacher and curator of the Conceptual Art Centre Bukovje/Landskrona.
• 16.00 Presentation of the stipend to Bogdan Szyber
• 16.05 Bogdan Szyber, The Journey into Szyberspace
• 16.30 Reception

Lars Vilks (1946–2021) was a Swedish artist who lived under police protection for many years following his 2007 drawings of the Prophet Muhammad. The foundation established in his memory awards an annual stipend for artistic freedom and freedom of expression.