The Vega Foundation Is Quietly Bankrolling Video Art's Biggest Names

Ali Cherri's film The Dam won the Silver Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale with funding from a Toronto organization most art-world insiders had never heard of: the Vega Foundation, founded in 2022 by collector Elisa Nuyten. Three years on, Vega has become a discreet lifeline for moving-image artists, commissioning new work by Martine Syms, Camille Henrot's peers Lucy Raven, Jordan Strafer, Stephanie Comilang, Diego Marcon, Sharon Lockhart, Alia Farid, Aria Dean, Lap-See Lam and Yuyan Wang.

The problem Vega addresses is simple: film and video art is notoriously hard to monetize, and funding has dried up further. Syms, whose 2022 feature The African Desperate was distributed by Mubi and who will get a Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles survey next year, described the gap bluntly. "I had a collector in Europe ask, 'Why should I buy video art?'" she said. "I was like, 'I don't fucking know.'" She added: "There's really no way to fund low-budget work."

Why is video art so hard to fund?

Six of the top ten works in ARTnews's 2025 list of the best artworks of the 21st century were moving-image pieces, including Camille Henrot's Grosse Fatigue (2013). Yet institutional acclaim hasn't translated into money. Henrot, represented by Hauser & Wirth, told Art in America: "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!"

Syms traced the shortage to market structure. "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."

Nuyten, a new addition to the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, doesn't collect much video herself. Speaking from her Paris home in April, surrounded by paintings by Miriam Cahn and a Pierre Huyghe aquarium, she conceded videos can be "hard to live with." "Collectors often stay away from the medium," she said. "That's why we quickly rose in the art world. Artists like talking to us."

What has Vega actually funded?

Vega's model commissions new works, shows them in institutions and biennials, then adds them to its collection. Its track record:

• Ali Cherri, The Dam (2022) — a Sundanese bricklayer builds a mud creation near the Nile; Silver Lion at Venice, screened at Cannes the same year.
• Diego Marcon, Krapfen (2025) — a child taunted by see-through green-screen beings; debuted at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, now the centerpiece of a solo show that opened this summer at the Art Gallery of Ontario and travels to New York's New Museum, where Nuyten is a trustee.
• Sharon Lockhart shot on Fogo Island, Newfoundland; Alia Farid filmed in southern Iraq; Aria Dean made the digital-slaughterhouse video Abattoir, U.S.A. (2023); Lap-See Lam and Yuyan Wang (a 2025 film about robots and animatronics, shown in Venice with the Fondazione In Between Art Film) round out the roster.
• Basma Al-Sharif, Morning Circle (2025), about an Armenian man and his Jordanian son in Germany. After Jewish organizations and conservative politicians publicly denounced the artist and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf following a screening — a "smear campaign," per artist Adam Broomberg and writer Michele Faguet writing in Hyperallergic — Nuyten doubled down. "Let's support the film of a great Palestinian artist," she recalled telling colleagues. "We want to help. We can be more political with our organization."

Curator Julia Paoli said she selects projects through studio visits and weighs Canadian connections. Budgets are tailor-made and always come with a presentation plan — a biennial, a 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. "These are high-stakes."

What happens next?

Nuyten raised in Belgium, started as a fashion entrepreneur — she ran the Toronto wholesale agency Vitamine Chic from 1988 to 1998 — and began collecting around 20 years ago, building a holdings that runs from Leonor Fini and Louise Bourgeois to Sarah Lucas, Philippe Parreno and Luc Tuymans. Vega, she said, lets her stay relevant and reach "more experimental, more political voices."

Vega isn't alone: the Fondazione In Between Art Film (Beatrice Bulgari) and the LAS Foundation (Jan Fischer, with Bettina Kames) both launched in 2019. But Vega's commissions now surface regularly in biennials and museums, often credited only in wall-text fine print.

As the foundation enters its fifth year, Nuyten has ruled out expansion into a brick-and-mortar museum. "I don't want to become the LUMA Foundation," she said, referring to Maja Hoffmann's Frank Gehry–designed Arles complex. "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." For artists who can't sell what they make, that refusal to build a destination means Vega's money keeps flowing where it's scarcest: into production itself.