Film London said the winner of the £10,000 award will be announced in London on 24 November 2026. The shortlisted artists' work will tour the UK in the autumn before being exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery from 17 November to 13 December, according to Film London's Jarman Award page. The Guardian, which reported the shortlist on 17 June, noted that the 2026 field has been streamlined to four artists, rather than the larger shortlists used in recent editions.
The prize is not a film-industry bauble in the usual sense. Film London describes the Jarman Award as a prize for artists working with moving image, built around experimentation, imagination and innovation in UK artist filmmaking. Whitechapel Gallery, a partner in the award, says it has a record of identifying artists who later move into the Turner Prize orbit, naming figures including Heather Phillipson, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Duncan Campbell, Charlotte Prodger, Laure Prouvost, Elizabeth Price, James Richards and Project Art Works as former Jarman shortlistees who were later shortlisted for or won the Turner Prize.
That history matters because the Jarman shortlist often works less like a prediction and more like a map. It shows what curators, programmers and moving-image specialists are prepared to put institutional weight behind before a wider art audience has necessarily caught up. Film London said the 2026 award was selected by a jury including Eve Gabereau of Modern Films, Woodrow Kernohan of John Hansard Gallery, Luke Moody of the BFI Doc Society Fund, 2025 shortlisted artist Hope Pearl Strickland and Whitechapel Gallery director Gilane Tawadros.
The four selections share an interest in memory and social record, but they arrive there through distinct forms. Film London said Hameed's five-channel work, Anak, Where Did We Stay?, combines personal and archival footage, including family home movies, to tell the story of the artist's mother's migration from the Philippines to Britain. The Guardian reported that the work sits in dialogue with Joshua Reynolds's 1776 painting Portrait of Omai, widening a family archive into a longer history of travel, arrival and representation.
Sagar's The Body Blow brings the award into a different kind of record: public health, labour and bureaucracy. Film London said the film examines high levels of asbestos and mesothelioma-related illness in Barking and Dagenham and was made with the London Asbestos Support Awareness Group, social workers, carers, asbestos-removal specialists, campaigners, and legal and medical professionals. The Guardian reported that the two-channel film takes its title from a 1962 radio ballad by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Charles Parker, and uses documentary material to look at the bodily and legal consequences of industrial exposure.