Connecting people through art 

We are happy to announce that Shahana Rajani (b.1987, Pakistan) is the first recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation – South Asian Video Art Production Grant in collaboration with Prameya Art Foundation, Delhi, India and in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, UAE; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), Belgium and Para Site (Hong Kong)

Jury Statement: “We are pleased to put forward Shahana Rajani's name as the recipient of the first South Asian Video Art Production Grant. Rajani situates her practice in an intricately woven web that binds the environment with social realities and sacred beliefs. She weaves together various kinds of material, media, testimonies and speculations that offer an image of our time from a vantage point that is at once particular and global.

Rajani's essayistic approach to the moving image is what the jury found most compelling. Her works invite reflection on the contemporary world where the question of ecology is as much cultural as it is natural, and constantly changing. Her videos therefore perform multiple roles, that include documenting, bearing witness, wandering, story-telling, fantasising and hoping. In times like this, it feels ever more important to listen rather than report. Rajani's work attempts to carry out a kind of listening, to things that are legible, illegible and the not yet legible in order to reflect on how every community's notion of belonging, resilience and resistance are as diverse as the histories they write.

We believe that this grant will enable Rajani to further the rigorous and sensitive methodology she has developed in these years.”

Shahana Rajani was selected as the recipient of the grant by a jury chaired by Han Nefkens and composed of Sabih Ahmed (Director, Ishara Art Foundation, UAE); Kyongfa Che (Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan); Nav Haq (Associate Director, M HKA, Belgium); Smita Prabhakar (Founder and Chairperson, Ishara Art Foundation, UAE); Anushka Rajendran (Curator, Prameya Art Foundation, India), Shefali Somani (Founder and Chairperson, Prameya Art Foundation, India), Anahita Taneja (Founder and Chairperson, Prameya Art Foundation, India); Billy Tang (Director, Para-Site, Hong Kong), Salma Tuqan (Director, Nottingham Contemporary, UK), in the presence of Hilde Teerlinck, CEO and Director of the Han Nefkens Foundation and Alessandra Biscaro, Coordinator of the Han Nefkens Foundation.

Shahana Rajani is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in tracing practices of belonging and resistance that are emerging at the intersections of sacred geographies, infrastructural violence and the climate crisis in Pakistan. Community-based and collaborative approaches to research are central to her practice. She uses video and sound to explore alternate, embodied ways of relating to the land and to each other. She is a co-founder of Karachi LaJamia (with Zahra Malkani) which is an experimental project exploring radical pedagogies in relation to struggles around land and water in the city.
shahanarajani.com

Shahana Rajani: “Over the past decade, I have been working in spaces and with communities that have been experiencing immense violence at the hands of development, infrastructure and militarisation in Karachi. During this time, I have become increasingly aware that the struggle is not just against the occupation and devastation of lands and ecologies, but the struggle is also at the level of the image, against erasure. I am honoured and excited to receive this grant, as I continue to think with and against visuality. This comes at a moment where I am searching for alternative frames of reference, for different understandings and lineages of vision and practices of representation as relation. In the coming year, with support from this grant, I hope to explore and engage further with dissident visualities and ecological knowledges which anchor and sustain practices of resistance and refusal in Pakistan.”

Shahana Rajani will receive $15,000 for the production of a new work for which she will have 9 months to complete. The new work will be presented by all the partner institutions of the Grant: Prameya Art Foundation, Delhi, India; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, UAE; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), Belgium; and Para-Site, Hong Kong.

The South Asian Video Art Production Grant involves the production of a screen-based video artwork. In order to consolidate the candidates’ career, the Grant has appraised artists living in the region of South Asia (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan) who have established a solid trajectory but who have not had the opportunity to exhibit extensively.

The long-list for this grant was put together by twelve internationally recognised art critics, curators and artists who were in turn nominated by the partner institutions of the grant. The scouting process itself expands the selected artist’s network of contacts and discovers lesser-known video art works and thus, in itself, also promotes this discipline.

The scouts for the inaugural South Asian Video Art Production Grant were Basir Mahmood (Pakistan), Hit Man Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari (Nepal), Sohrab Hura (India), Khoj International Artists' Association (India), Tomoko Kuroiwa (Japan), Quddus Mirza (Pakistan), Sharmini Pereira (Sri Lanka), Zarmeene Shah (Pakistan), Ritu Sarin & Tenzing Sonam (Tibet, India), Jagath Weerasinghe (Sri Lanka).

The shortlisted artists were Abdul Halik Azeez (b.1985, Sri Lanka), Bibhusan Basnet and Pooja Gurung (b.1986, Nepal), Palash Bhattacharjee (b.1983, Bangladesh), Mekh Limbu (b.1985, Nepal), Subash Thebe Limbu (b.1981, Nepal/UK), Danushka Marasinghe (b.1985, Sri Lanka), Paribartana Mohanty (b.1982, India), Dishant Pradhan (b.1995, India), Shahana Rajani (b.1987, Pakistan), Afrah Shafiq (b.1989, India).