Vishal Kumaraswamy is the recipient of the second Han Nefkens Foundation – South Asian Video Art Production Grant. He will receive $15,000 for the production of a new work that will be presented at partner art institutions worldwide, including the Prameya Art Foundation, Delhi; Ishara art Foundation, Dubai; Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; deCentral, Bangkok; Para Site, Hong Kong and Artspace, Sydney.
Kumaraswamy is a multidisciplinary artist and curator from Bengaluru. His work, spanning text, film, sound, performance and computational arts, explores the power and potential of media technologies to imagine embodied, gestural ways of fostering the further development of Dalit cultural practices.
The jury of the 2025 edition was chaired by Han Nefkens and composed of Anushka Rajendran, curator at Prameya Art Foundation; Sasha Altaf, director of Ishara Art Foundation, Nav Haq, artistic director at Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp; Punn Chirakiti, co-founder and co-executive director of deCentral; Zoe Butt, artistic director of deCentral; Celia Ho, curator at Para Site; Victor Wang, director at Artspace and Katie Dyer, senior curator at Artspace.
Speaking about Kumaraswamy, the jury said ‘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.’
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