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 (PRAF), 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).
The Han Nefkens Foundation's Video Art Production Grants are tied to several partner institutions that will commit to showing the newly produced work. In this way, the grant offers the artist the chance to forge a dialogue with art professionals from each institution and to show the new work to a large international public in different social, cultural and political contexts.
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); Kyongfa Che (Curator, MOT); Nav Haq (Associate Director, M HKA); Smita Prabhakar (Founder and Chairperson, Ishara Art Foundation); Anushka Rajendran (Curator, PRAF), Shefali Somani (Founder and Chairperson, PRAF), Anahita Taneja (Founder and Chairperson, PRAF); Billy Tang (Director, Para-Site), Salma Tuqan (Director, Nottingham Contemporary), in the presence of Hilde Teerlinck and Alessandra Biscaro, respectively Director and Coordinator of the Han Nefkens Foundation.
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 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.
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.”
