We are thrilled to announce that Vishal Kumaraswamy (1988, India) is the winner of the Han Nefkens Foundation—South Asian Video Art Production Grant 2025 presented in collaboration with Prameya Art Foundation, Delhi (India) and in partnership with Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (UAE); Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA, Belgium); deCentral, Bangkok (Thailand); Para Site, (Hong Kong) and Artspace, Sydney (Australia).
Vishal Kumaraswamy was selected as the recipient of the grant by a jury chaired by Mr. Han Nefkens and composed of Anushka Rajendran—Curator at Prameya Art Foundation; Sasha Altaf—Director of Ishara Art Foundation; Nav Haq—Artistic Director at M HKA; Punn Chirakiti and Zoe Butt—respectively Co-founder, Co-Executive Director and Artistic Director of deCentral; Celia Ho—Curator at Para Site, Hong Kong; Victor Wang and Katie Dyer—respectively Director and Senior Curator at Artspace, Sydney, and in the presence of Hilde Teerlinck and Alessandra Biscaro, respectively Director and Coordinator of the Han Nefkens Foundation.
The Jury stated: “We are pleased to announce Vishal Kumaraswamy as this year's winner. We selected him for his depth and originality of practice that critically appropriates technologies such as AI, motion capture, and surveillance systems, exposing and destabilising the hierarchies embedded within them. We were inspired by how Vishal's practice offers striking counter-hegemonic perspectives emerging from Dalit resistance movements.”
“His works operate across intellectual, poetic, and speculative registers, while his bilingual practice in Kannada and English, combined with caste-specific musical traditions, resists assimilation into dominant cultural frameworks. Through a multi-sensory, non-linear storytelling approach rooted in oral and sonic traditions, Kumaraswamy asserts a powerful and distinctive artistic voice.”
Vishal Kumaraswamy “Over the last eight years, I have been working with film, video, sound, and performance by employing experimental and emergent technologies, understanding that the struggle against caste operates at multiple registers, from material dispossession to individual pixels and frequencies. I come from a region with long histories of resisting caste, including the Bandaya literary movement in Karnataka, and I continue to be a student of these histories. Subversive, counter-mythological strategies employed by Dalit and marginalised caste communities have led to innovative forms of cultural and literary production, and my work strives to ensure their continuity. I am honoured and grateful to receive this grant at a pivotal moment as I deepen my efforts to re-centre our traditional knowledge systems and investigate how the transformative potential of video and imaging technologies can foster future Dalit imaginaries.”
Vishal Kumaraswamy will receive 15,000 dollars for the production of a new work which will be presented by each partner institution.
The Han Nefkens Foundation – South Asian Video Art Production Grant aims to be a tool for increasing contemporary artistic production in the video art field and is directed at artists living in South Asia. The Grant involves the production of a video art work. In order to consolidate the candidates’ career, the South Asian Video Art Production Grant appraises the work of 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 Foundation and the partner institutions are grateful to the invaluable support of an international panel of experts: Shawon Akand—Bangladesh; Sandev Handy—Sri Lanka; Natasha Ginwala—India; Raqs Media Collective—India; Shaunak Mahbubani—India; Aziz Sohail — Pakistan; Adeela Suleman—Pakistan; Rattanamol Singh Johal—India / United States and Shaleen Wadhwana—India.
The artist shortlist for the grant included Abdul Halik Azeez—Sri Lanka—1985; Rahul Juneja—India—1999; Ohida Khandakar—India—1993; Vishal Kumaraswamy—India—1988; Samina Laghari—Pakistan—1984; Irtiza Malik—India—1999; Mekha Bahadur Limbu Subba—Nepal—1985 and Subash Thebe—Nepal—1981.
