Connecting people through art 

The Han Nefkens Foundation, in collaboration with Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee – museo Madre, is thrilled to announce the European premiere of More Spilled Blood Than Drinkable Water, the latest work of Panos Aprahamian, recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2024, which made the production of this work possible.

More Spilled Blood Than Drinkable Water (2025) is the third and final chapter of the thematic trilogy informally known as the Karantina Trilogy. All three short films take place in or around Karantina, Beirut’s former quarantine district, one of the most polluted areas of the city due to its proximity to the port, a waste-sorting facility, and a notorious slaughterhouse that is now closed.

In the film, the narrator, a paranormal investigator, recounts her contemplative journey along the river as a descent into the underworld, addressing the chemical compounds, spectral echoes, foul smells, and invisible presences inhabiting a dystopian landscape made of flows and stagnations. As the camera follows the river’s surfacings and submersions, capturing glimpses of deteriorating ecologies and the trembling reflections of industrial infrastructures, the narration weaves together historical timelines in a non-linear sequence.

Blending documentary realism, abstract sequences, and fictional genres, the work slowly excavates the deep layers of pain within a wounded landscape inhabited by the spirits of countless human and non-human entities that lost their lives there. By transforming the body of water into a portal toward intangible worlds and a restless mirror of the present, Aprahamian’s work reflects on — and bears witness to — the consequences of violence, historical trauma, and environmental degradation.

The work will be on view at MADRE, from 18th December 2025 to 17th February 2026.

An instrument for supporting contemporary artistic production in the field of video art, the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant is awarded annually to an emerging visual artist from Central or West Asia. In addition to financial support, the grant connects the awardee to an international network of institutions committed to showing the newly produced work.  In this way, the awardees are given the opportunity to dialogue with art professionals at each institution and present their work in different social, cultural, and political contexts.  

The partners for the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2024 are: NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; WIELS (Brussels, Belgium); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (Manila, Philippines); Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai, UAE) and Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee – museo Madre(Naples, Italy). NTU CCA Singapore is a partner of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant since 2019. 

Panos Aprahamian (Lebanon, 1986) is a writer, filmmaker, and media artist from Beirut who currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His practice explores the spectral presence of the past and the future in human and nonhuman bodies, sacrificial landscapes, cultural practices, and social relations. He was a Home Workspace Program fellow at Ashkal Alwan (Beirut, Lebanon) in 2017-18 and an instructor in the Media Studies Program at the Fine Arts & Art History Department, American University of Beirut between 2019 and 2021. His film essays Odorless Blue Flowers Awake Prematurely  and This Haunting Memory That Is Not My Own (both  2021) earned the Ecumenical Prize at the 68th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Germany, 2022) and the Jury Award at the 7th Festival Internacional Signos da Noite (Lisbon, Portugal 2021), respectively. He received the equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree in Media Arts from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, University of Balamand (2008), and an MA with distinction in Documentary Film from the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, where he studied as a Caspian Arts Scholar.