You are about to hear a lot more from the Toronto-based Vega Foundation, whose core mission is to support artists’ film and video works by commissioning new pieces and stewarding its growing collection. It has worked with more than a dozen artists over the past two years and has big projects launching in the coming months.
The foundation takes its name from the brightest star in the constellation of Lyra, part of a larger network of stars that form a guiding light. It was established in 2022 by Elisa Nuyten, a philanthropist and collector who splits her time between Toronto and Paris, with Julia Paoli assuming the director and curator role the following year.
“It began with a desire to deepen my engagement with both the medium and the practices that are pushing its boundaries,” Nuyten tells The Art Newspaper. “This helped us shape the foundation’s mandate, which is to support artists’ film and video at every stage of the process.”
The foundation’s projects to date are a who’s-who of moving image artists, from Meriem Bennani, Tala Madani, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. The foundation has partnered with prominent museums and organisations around the world including the Serpentine in London, the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the New Museum in New York City, the Vennice Biennale, Kunsthalle Basel and the Power Plant in Toronto. Forthcoming are projects with the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and others.
Stephanie Comilang, still from Search for Life II, 2025. Search for Life is a work in the form of a diptych commissioned by The Vega Foundation, TBA21, and Sharjah Art Foundation Courtesy the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
The first of the foundation’s commissions was Alia Farid’s Chibayish in 2023, about the politicisation of the landscape of southern Iraq. That was followed by 2024 commissions by Jordan Strafer, Lap-See Lam, Danielle Dean and Alexis Kyle Mitchell. Among its most recent commissions is Search for Life II (2025) by the Filipina Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang, who won the Sobey Art Award—Canada’s top contemporary art prize—in 2019. The video follows pearl divers in China, the Persian Gulf and the Philippines, and chronicles the industrialisation of pearl production.
“Our curatorial approach is rooted in providing direct support to artists, working closely with them to bring their most ambitious ideas to life,” Paoli says. “We’re committed to stewarding the film and video works we commission and collect, with deep appreciation for their complexity, depth and vision.”
The foundation’s latest commissions are by the Arizona-born, New York-based artist Lucy Raven, the Italian artist Rosa Barba and the Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart (who represented Poland at the 2017 Venice Biennale). Raven’s video, Murderers Bar (2023-25), focuses on the removal of a century-old concrete dam along the Klamath River in northern California, part of the largest dam removal project ever undertaken, at a cost of $500m. The video will be accompanied by an ensemble of sculptural elements when it premieres at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) next month (18 April-28 September). Murderers Bar will also be the first work in the VAG’s collection to be be co-owned with another institution, that being the Vega Foundation.
Lucy Raven, production still from Murderers Bar, 2025. Co-commissioned and jointly acquired by The Vega Foundation and the Vancouver Art Gallery Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery. © Lucy Raven, 2025.
Barba’s new work, co-commissioned by Vega and MoMA in New York, will go on view at the later this spring (3 May-6 July). Her installation will feature works spanning around 15 working years of her practice including film, kinetic sculpture and sound. The newly-commissioned work Charge (2025) forms the core of the installation and examines light as a source of ecological change and scientific innovation.
As for Lockhart, she chronicles her three summers on Fogo Island—largest of the islands off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada’s far east—in WINDWARD (2025), which will appropriately go on view this spring at the Fogo Island Gallery (10 May-31 October). That project was co-commissioned by Vega and a handful of other Canadian institutions including Fogo Island Arts and the National Gallery of Canada, with the support of the Power Plant in Toronto and Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Alberta.
“In Canada there is a long and rich history of artists’ film and video, and my hope is that Vega can make an important contribution towards expanding and sustaining it,” Nuyten says. “I find that incredibly exciting because we get to be in dialogue with such amazing artists from the moment they envision a work to when it is first presented to the public.”
