The Han Nefkens Foundation has awarded the Filipino artist John Torres & Shireen Seno the Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+, Hong Kong and Singapore Art Museum – Moving Image Commission.
Established in 2023, the grant aims to consolidate the careers of video artists living in Southeast Asia. Seno and Torres will receive USD$100,000 to produce a screen-based video artwork which will be installed at each of the awarding institutions.
Born in the Philippines, Seno is an artist and filmmaker whose work addresses notions memory, history and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home. She was also shortlisted for the Han Nefkens Foundation – Southeast Asian Video Art Production Grant last year. Also born in the Philippines, Torres’s film and moving-image works – he is also a practising musician and writer – gather fragments of stories in the context of state oppression in the Philippines.
Seno and Torres said of their awarding: ‘We are filmmakers in different stages of our career and we have never co-directed. We are also parents to two little ones. It is in this space between film and art that we get to work together as we reflect on our role as artist-parents responding to the world while thinking about our personal histories and navigating new and other ways of making sense of things.’
Seno and Torres were selected by a jury chaired by Han Nefkens and composed of the directors of each museum: Kataoka Mami (Director, Mori Art Museum), Suhanya Raffel (Museum Director, M+, Hong Kong) and Eugene Tan (Director, Singapore Art Museum).
Also shortlited for the prize were Che-Yu Hsu (b.1985, Taiwan), Riar Rizaldi (b. 1990, Indonesia) and Yashaswini Raghunandan (b.1986, India).
