Barcelona’s Han Nefkens Foundation has awarded its inaugural Mediterranean Video Art Production Grant 2026 to French Lebanese filmmaker Valentin Noujaïm. The award provides EUR 25,000 (USD 28,500) to support the production of a new screen-based work by artists based in countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. The sum exceeds the USD 15,000 offered through the foundation’s other regional programs, including this year’s Southeast Asian Grant, which went to Bangkok-based artist Chantana Tiprachart. 

Born in 1991 and and based between Paris and Athens, Noujaïm studied screenwriting at La Fémis in Paris and graduated in 2020. His films move between documentary and fiction to explore how erasure, surveillance, and marginalization shape places and infrastructures. His La Défense trilogy—comprising Pacific Club (2023), To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion (2024), and Demons to Diamonds (2025)—has been shown at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He recently participated in the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2026) and the Istanbul Biennale (2025), and presented his first institutional solo exhibition, “PANTHEON,” at Kunsthalle Basel in 2025. 

Noujaïm was selected from a shortlist of nine artists. The jury praised his “original contribution to moving-image practice” and “distinctive approach to the city and architecture,” which “expands the possibilities of cinematic storytelling and demonstrates a strong potential for further artistic exploration.” 

Noujaïm said he was deeply honored to receive the grant and described it as “something rare in the life of an artist: the permission to follow a question before it has fully formed. To research without justifying.”

Over the next nine months, Noujaïm will develop a new project as part of the grant, to be presented across the award’s partner institutions—including the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, Ljubljana’s Cukrarna Gallery, the Bonner Kunstverein in Germany, Boden’s Havremagasinet Länskonsthall, the Fotografiska Shanghai, Istanbul’s Salt, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome—as well as at seven universities across northern Sweden, Europe, and China. 

Sabrina Hau is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.