To describe the plight of artists who make films and videos, Martine Syms compared the situation to a viral meme starring a giant, vacant head waiting to be filled in with words below a familiar prompt: “Why you so quiet? What’s on your mind?” For her part, Syms said she would fill in that empty noggin with some stark words: “I’m trying to fund my no-budget experimental film.”
There has never been an especially easy time to make moving-image art, which is notoriously hard to monetize. But these days, the challenge is even more formidable because of the abundance of film and video art in the context of biennials, museums, and the art discourse more broadly.
Syms should know. For more than a decade, she has conceived acclaimed videos, installations, and performances about identity, often with a focus on Blackness and meme culture. Such work has earned her representation by three blue-chip galleries, and her 2022 feature film The African Desperate was theatrically distributed by Mubi, the company that would spin the Demi Moore–starring horror movie The Substance into a surprise Oscar contender two years later. She will also be the subject of a Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles survey next year.
But Syms said she still faces a widespread lack of understanding about film/video work and the shortage of funding to accompany it. “I had a collector in Europe ask, ‘Why should I buy video art?’” she told me. “I was like, ‘I don’t fucking know.’” (She later clarified that she hadn’t felt compelled to dignify that collector with an answer, saying, “It has nothing to do with me.”)
The problem is not unique to her, either. When ARTnews surveyed the best artworks of the 21st century so far in 2025, six of the top 10 pieces were moving-image works. One of those was Grosse Fatigue (2013), a widely shown video essay by Camille Henrot about the creation of the universe represented through images and videos clicked open on a computer desktop. Henrot, who debuted her first follow-up moving-image work after more than a decade earlier this year, said that support for such work remains hard to come by, even after endorsements from international institutions and representation by the mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth. She recently told Art in America, ARTnews’s sister publication, “I saw someone commenting about the current art market crisis, suggesting that what sells now is experiences, and also works that are easy to transport. I was like, wait! I have your medium! Film!”
When Syms and I spoke in the spring, I asked why acclaimed video artists like she and Henrot face such trouble. “The big answer, I guess, is that it’s a market imperative,” she said. “Increasingly, there are investors that galleries are reporting to—stakeholder interests. It’s a bigger thing that’s happening across moving images.” She added, “There’s really no way to fund low-budget work.”
Here to help improve the situation, at least in part, is the Vega Foundation, a Toronto-based art organization founded by collector Elisa Nuyten. Vega has supported video artists such as Syms by commissioning new works and showing them in institutions and biennials before adding them to its own collection. For Syms—and other notable artists including Lucy Raven, Jordan Strafer, and Stephanie Comilang—the Vega Foundation has become a lifeline.
Syms is currently at work on a new commission from Vega that will appear in her survey at MOCA LA: RW-LO, which she described as a “film about a Real World superfan in Y2K New Orleans.” (She described the work as being “inspired by a true story,” since the hit MTV reality show’s ninth season was shot in the Big Easy in the year 2000, and added, “I was myself a Real World superfan.”)
Syms said she spent nearly 20 years conceiving the work but it was only recently that the Vega Foundation helped make the project a reality. Having struck up a conversation with the foundation several years ago, she approached Vega with a version of a script. Without much delay, the foundation gave her funding. “They’ve been great to work with,” Syms said. “They’re the best kind of collaborator.”
“I do feel that video art is under-supported,” Nuyten, a new addition to the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, said in April, speaking from her home in Paris (she splits her time between there and Toronto). She was quick to note that she was surrounded by paintings and sculptures—a landscape by Miriam Cahn and an aquarium by Pierre Huyghe, for example. There were notably few videos, which she conceded can be “hard to live with.” She added: “Collectors often stay away from the medium. That’s why we quickly rose in the art world. Artists like talking to us.”
Founded in 2022, Vega is not the only organization of its kind—there’s also the Fondazione In Between Art Film and the LAS Foundation, both of which were launched in 2019 by collectors (Beatrice Bulgari for the former; Jan Fischer for the latter, working in association with Bettina Kames). But the Vega Foundation stands out as a leader in the field, with commissions regularly popping up in biennials and museums. Often, the only way to know about the foundation’s involvement in a project is to read the fine print on a wall text. Still, Vega’s behind-the-scenes efforts have helped to shape video art as it stands today.
One of the foundation’s first commissions was for Ali Cherri, a Lebanese artist whose Vega-supported film The Dam (2022) centers on a Sundanese bricklayer who, in his spare time, begins making a mud creation near the Nile. The film showed in the 2022 Venice Biennale, where it won the Silver Lion for an emerging artist; the jury praised Cherri’s work for its ability to bring “a meditation on earth, fire and water from a constructive perspective to a mythical dimension.” That same year, a version of it was screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
More recently, Vega helped fund Diego Marcon’s Krapfen (2025), a film in which a child is taunted by invisible beings that sing and dance. (Marcon, a young Italian artist with a flair for eerie, exquisite absurdism, rendered those beings as see-through by using green-screen technology.) Krapfen made its debut in 2025 at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, where Newcity praised it as a “must-see,” and then formed the centerpiece of a Marcon solo show that opened this past summer at the Art Gallery of Ontario and will soon travel to New York’s New Museum, where Nuyten is a trustee.
Between the Cherri and Marcon works, Vega commissioned artists such as Sharon Lockhart, an American filmmaker who used the foundation’s funding to shoot on Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland; Alia Farid, a Kuwaiti biennial-circuit staple whose Vega project took her to southern Iraq; and Aria Dean, a rising American star whose widely praised video Abattoir, U.S.A.! (2023) centers on a slaughterhouse that she rendered digitally; and Lap-See Lam, a Swedish phenom whose films have pondered aspects of the Chinese diaspora. Vega’s adventurous support continued this year with a new commission by Yuyan Wang, who unveiled a film about robots and animatronics as part of a show organized by the Fondazione In Between Art Film in Venice.
Julia Paoli, the Vega Foundation’s curator, said she decides which projects to fund based in part on studio visits with artists. “We’re really trying to understand what artists are thinking through and working on, and also what our colleagues and peers are thinking about, so that we can stay rigorous,” she said. She also considers whether an artist or their work bears any connection to Canada, or whether a potential video commission could be presented with a partner institution there.
Otherwise, Paoli noted few parameters for a Vega commission, saying that each budget is tailor-made to its recipient. The budgets also come with a plan for where to present the work, be it a biennial, a film festival, or a museum. “We’re talking about the production of incredibly rigorous, complicated work, so I’m coming at it from a deeply researched curatorial perspective,” Paoli said of such expensive and time-consuming projects. “These are high-stakes.”
The Vega Foundation grew out of Nuyten’s collecting. Raised in Belgium, she started Vitamine Chic, a wholesale fashion agency in Toronto that she ran from 1988 until she sold it in 1998. Around 20 years ago, while traveling in Europe, Nuyten began buying art. “I decided I wanted to apply myself to contemporary art and learn about it,” she said. “I didn’t have an art history degree, but I went to local galleries. Slowly, I started to travel more and to collect more. I wanted art on my walls—I wanted interesting things for my children, and for us as a family, to respond to.”
Nuyten’s collection now includes quite a bit of historical art, by artists ranging from the Surrealist painter Leonor Fini to the French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, as well as works by some of today’s most famous living artists: Sarah Lucas, Philippe Parreno, Luc Tuymans, and others. But Nuyten spoke most highly of the “younger generations of artists” working today, many of whom are attracted to video. Starting the Vega Foundation was an attempt to connect with such stars in the making. “It was a very easy decision,” Nuyten said. “I felt that it would allow me to stay relevant” and reach “more experimental, more political voices.”
She was specific about the political aspect of what she does, recalling that amid Israel’s war in Gaza she told her colleagues at Vega Foundation, “Let’s support the film of a great Palestinian artist.” With Palestinian artists facing pushback, and in some cases censorship, in mainstream institutions, Vega threw its support behind the Berlin-based filmmaker Basma Al-Sharif, whose 2025 commission Morning Circle focuses on an Armenian man and his Jordanian son in Germany. Though the film doesn’t directly address the war in Gaza, it was politicized in Germany. When al-Sharif screened it at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf this year, Jewish organizations and conservative politicians issued public denouncements of both the artist and the storied art school, in what the artist Adam Broomberg and writer Michele Faguet described as a “smear campaign” in a Hyperallergic defense of al-Sharif’s film. In mind of supporting work of the kind, Nuyten said, “We want to help. We can be more political with our organization.”
The Vega Foundation is currently gearing up for its fifth year, and Nuyten has been thinking about its future. “I don’t want to become the LUMA Foundation,” she said, referring to collector Maja Hoffmann’s long-running art organization that went on to open a Frank Gehry–designed museum in Arles, France. “I don’t want to open a space.”
Asked why not, she scrunched up her face. “To have a permanent space, that almost makes me feel a bit claustrophobic. It would be so non-dynamic—the opposite of what we want to be.”
A version of this article that appeared in print stated that Basma Al-Sharif’s film focused on Palestinian woman. In fact, it centers on an Armenian father and his Jordanian son.