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Stiftung Niedersachsen Media Art Grants at the Haus für Medienkunst
Jury Statement 2026
We’d like to thank all artists for their application and acknowledge the labour entailed in this process. There was a total of 359 applications in total, with a very high standard of professionalism overall.
Many of the applications sought to respond to a world that is both haunted by past and present conflicts, while at the same time increasingly filtered by artificial intelligence and algorithmic powers that reconfigure our social and environmental perceptions. The revisitation of autobiographical, local and place-based stories, through long term, research driven, approaches were also common threads of practice.
This years’ grantees selected and announced by the jury:
Basir Mahmood
Basir Mahmood is an artist based between Lahore and Amsterdam, working with video, film, and photography.
Addressing the embodied histories that remain in the aftermath of the ‘Lollywood’ film industry in Lahore, Pakistan, Basir Mahmood will develop a multi-channel installation that centres on film costumes produced by designer, Abbas Dress Master, who worked in the industry for over 45 years. These costumes – once worn by heroes, villains, lovers, extras, and bystanders – carry the physical memory of characters, stories, and labour shaped by decades of filmmaking. The multi-media installation sees the costumes as active agents in the work, forming the basis of a collaborative writing process with Lollywood screenwriters.
As Mahmood writes: ‘the project asks whether Lollywood, through its own aesthetics, labour structures, and modes of storytelling, can articulate its ending not as disappearance, but as transformation, reflecting the changing social, political, and cultural conditions of the present.’
The jury were compelled by the focus on the specific vignettes of cultural history within the film industry in Lahore, the project more broadly speaks to the legacies of discarded spaces of cultural production and its labour; reimagined as source material of social histories.
Syaura Qotrunadha
Syaura Qotrunadha is an artist from Indonesia working with historical and digital archives across various media.
Qotrunadha’s project is an exhibitionary development of a series of video works that explore Indonesia’s education system and societal beliefs shaped by colonial history, land acquisition, and visions of the future. Each video tells a story of resistance to colonialism and the lingering complexities of the postcolonial condition. Thinking through natural elements and across generations this ambitious project imbues local and traditional knowledge in reimagining the future. According to the artist ‘this project tries to reexamine history and explores how postcolonial nations can repurpose contemporary science and technology.’
The final presentation will be developed as an elaborate video collage with elements of sculptural installation that respond to an exploration of future human-technology relationships.
Romana Schmalisch & Robert Schlicht
A collaboration between Berlin-based artists Romana Schmalisch and Robert Schlicht, working at the interface of film and theory to examine how historical processes and societal structures can be represented in film.
Using the historical correspondence of student-led communist groups between Albania and West-Germany in the 1970s, the project looks at how society and social ideals are imaginatively constructed and represented at a distance.
The proposed three-channel film installation will combine documentary materials from the Tirana Film Archive and amateur footage from tourist visits to Socialist Albania in the 1970s and 80s, as well as views of the villa and former residence of Albanian Head of State Enver Hoxha, until recently closed off from public view and dormant since the fall of the communist regime. Now the site of an artist residency and newly surrounded by skyscrapers and other urban developments, the villa comes to represent a cipher of social and ideological change. The work reflects on the challenges in the image construction and representability of social transformations.
Jury 2026
Hajra Haider Karrar
Matt Packer
Edit Molnár
Marcel Schwierin
Applications for the 2027 scholarships will be accepted from December 2026 to February 2027. If you would like to be notified when the application process opens, you can subscribe to our newsletter here.
STIFTUNG NIEDERSACHSEN MEDIA ART GRANTS
The Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg will award three Media Art Grants of the Stiftung
Niedersachsen (€12,500 each).
The Stiftung Niedersachsen grant at the Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg supports a wide spectrum
of media art, from video art and net-based projects to audio works and audiovisual installations.
Each of the three grants will be awarded for the production of a new project in the area of media art.
An international jury will convene to select the grant recipients.
