Sharjah24: Sharjah Art Foundation has shortlisted 10 artists, duos and collectives for its 2022 Production Grant. In this 8th cycle of the Foundation’s biannual Production Grant, a total of 200,000 USD will be distributed to provide core funding and professional support for the realisation of the grantees’ proposed projects.

Selected from an international open call, the 2022 awardees are:

Abdul Halik Azeez, Nadir Boumouch & Soumeya Ait Ahmed, Nadim Choufi, Mbali Dhlamini & Phumulani Ntuli (Preempt Group), Inas Halabi, Asmaa Jama & Gouled Ahmed, Zahra Malkani, Paribartana Mohanty, Aarti Sunder and Mila Turajlić. The 2022 awardees were selected by Nada Raza (Curator) and Ala Younis (Artist, Researcher and Curator). 

One of the Foundation’s core initiatives, the Production Grant broadens the possibilities for the making of art by offering funding as well as professional and developmental support to regional and international artists. Through a biannual open call, art practitioners are invited to propose projects that inspire, inquire, investigate and give rise to meaningful collective experiences. Awardees work closely with the Foundation to develop, produce and present their projects, which span a wide range of media, including sculpture, artist’s books, mixed media, installation and performance.

Past Production Grant cycles have made significant contributions to the rise in artistic activity throughout the region and beyond, enabling artists to realise ambitious projects of a scale and complexity that would have been challenging to achieve without this support. Many of the resulting projects have been presented by organisations around the world, contributing to increased visibility and awareness of the grantees’ practices. Examples include 2010 grantees CAMP and Bani Abidi whose projects premiered at dOCUMENTA (13); 2012 grantee Sean Gullette whose film Traitors premiered at the 2013 Venice Film Festival; Lindsay Seers’ Nowhere Less Now presented in London by Artangel and now part of the Artangel Collection at Tate; 2014 grantee Jumana Manna’s film A Magical Substance Flows into Me, which premiered as part of her solo exhibition at London’s Chisenhale Gallery in 2015; 2016 grantee Khaled Sabsabi’s Bring the Silence, included in the 21st Biennale of Sydney; and 2018 grantee Mounira Al Solh whose work 
Freedom is a Habit I am Trying to Learn was avant-premiered at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 2019. 

Originally launched alongside Sharjah Biennial 9 in 2009, the Production Grants are among a growing number of year-round opportunities and programmes offered by Sharjah Art Foundation to support artists and art practitioners in the production and development of new creative work, including curatorial residencies and grants for the creation of short films and publishing projects. The Production Grant has been offered biannually since 2010, following the first cycle in 2009 that received over 500 submissions, from which 28 projects were selected for production and presentation in the Biennial.