Shahana Rajani wins the Han Nefkens Foundation – South Asian Video Art Production Grant 2023
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).
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.
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.