The 2026 Jarman Award Shortlist has been announced. Each year, the prize spotlights artists who are reinventing what moving-image work can be. Taking its name from the radical filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman (1942–1994), the award seeks out practices that echo his bold, boundary-breaking approach. This edition’s shortlist are no different, with Sadia Pineda Hameed, Ilona Sagar, Rhea Storr and Alia Syed presenting work that is brave, poetic and uniquely experimental. Storytelling, family relationships and oral histories intertwine with home movies, archival footage and abstract images in works that explore migration, identity and intergenerational trauma. Adrian Wootton OBE, Chief Executive of Film London, said: “Every year the Film London Jarman Award serves to thrill and inspire while also challenging us to reappraise our views and our understanding of the world around us. Between them Sadia, Ilona, Rhea and Alia blend the personal with the universal in unique and innovative ways, imbuing the commonplace with a sense of the extraordinary while skilfully unpicking some tremendously complex issues.”
Rhea Storr
Rhea Storr explores the in-between, translation, format and aesthetics, that depict themes such as masquerade, the performances of Black women and community space. In New Territories (spectacle is king), the artist presents a silent tableau that takes viewers to a summer of carnivals held in cities across the UK. With the sound muted, attention shifts to the striking contrast between the extravagant costumes of the participants and the mundane background of British high streets, parks and monuments, as the work explores the implications of a largely Black community creating a spectacle for predominantly white consumption. The artist won the 2020 Aesthetica Art Prize for A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message.
Sadia Pineda Hameed
The artist brings together personal and archival footage, alongside her parent’s home movies, in a witty, playful five-channel video. Anak, Where Did We Say?, tells the story of Hameed’s mother’s migration from the Philippines to Britain. The film becomes a gathering site for personal and collective experiences of journeys. Family collections, Beatlemania, a basking shark, lapping waves and an Enoch Powell protest are interspersed with pictures of road trips, as time converges to tell the story of migration from one archipelago to another. The result is an intuitive narrative of the unrecorded experience of arrival, homemaking and survival through community and joy, anchored by conversation with the artist’s mother.
Ilona Sagar
Barking and Dagenham’s high level of asbestos related illnesses are examined in this deeply affecting film by Ilona Sagar. The project was made in collaboration with the London Asbestos Support Awareness Group, social workers, end-of-life carers, asbestos removal experts, campaigners and legal and medical professionals. The film shows the processes of claiming compensation for work-related illnesses, including the indignity of having your “usefulness” measured for claim. Footage of a lung operation and wide shots of industrial landscapes are collaged between interviews as we see how Work Capability Assessments and legal statistical measurements have become controls by which the individual can be mediated.
Alia Syed
Alia Syed creates work that navigates geography, memory and the fragmented nature of diasporic identity. Here, she presents a performative video diary, described as “a family archaeology of what you can and can’t uncover through the image.” The film appropriates footage shot by the artist’s father on a snowy day in the winter of 1995, at a time when Syed and her father were not speaking to one another. The emotionally charged piece uses the degraded tape and captures it digitally, interspersing it with text, mingling voices and overlaid videos filmed in later times, with the work allowing a different picture to emerge. She was nominated for the Film London Jarman Award in 2015 and the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2020.
The shortlisted artists’ works will be on display at Whitechapel Gallery, London from 17 November – 13 December: whitechapelgallery.org
The winner of the Jarman Award will be announced on 24 November 2026 in London.
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. Rhea Storr, A Protest, a Celebration, a Mixed Message (2018), film still.
2. Rhea Storr, Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical (2020), film still.
3. Sadia Pineda Hameed, Anak Where Did We Stay_ (2026), film still.
4. Ilona Sagar, Other Actors (2025), video still.
5. Alia Syed, The Dhaba 1st Chapter- Mr Sharif and 2nd Chapter- Mr Bhari (2025), film still.
