After reviewing over 400 applications, the group of peers, which included Golrokh Nafisi (visual artist, illustrator, puppet maker, Amsterdam/Tehran), Jasmina Metwaly (visual artist, Berlin/Cairo), Mohamed Sido Lansari (director of Cinémathèque de Tanger and filmmaker, Tangier), Nadim Bahsoun (dancer and performer, Paris/Beirut), and Noor Abuarafeh (visual artist, Jerusalem/Maastricht), invited 10 artists whose practices they were excited to follow to participate in the program.
Participating artists:
Azza Ezzat (b.1980, Egypt) is a visual artist interested in hands-on engagement with the urban and ecological realities of the city of Cairo. Her work, often participatory and interactive, explores ways of humanizing the urban landscape.
Dina Shilleh (b.1984, Palestine) is a musician whose work focuses on the structure of music and new types of repertoires, non-traditional concerts, and experimenting with performance. Most recently, she has been developing a book in Arabic for teaching piano for beginners.
Eslam Abd El Salam (b.1989, Egypt) is a photographer and visual artist working with polaroid and analog films. Fascinated by the body in motion, he explores themes spanning from identity, family, and age to longing, wonderment, depression, and spirituality.
Ghinwa Yassine (b. 1984, Lebanon) is a visual artist interested in the body as a site where personal and collective memories manifest. Her work combines knowledge from neuroscience, somatic research, politics, and feminism, in its attempt to confront ideological and patriarchal systems.
Magid (b.1996, Palestine) is a visual artist exploring human bodies using charcoal drawings. They are currently investigating queer histories in Palestine for an interactive performance centered on clothing and fashion.
Manar Ali Hassan (b.1980, Lebanon) is a visual artist whose work is an ongoing investigation of what it is like to be a woman living with a chronic disease, drawing on her own experience of living with fibromyalgia.
Mohamed A. Gawad (B. 1983, Egypt) is a filmmaker and editor working primarily with found footage — specifically as an ever-growing heritage of images which he uses to reconsider the spatio-temporal conventions of film, and evoke the futures that images hold within.
Sara Fakhry Ismail (b.1987, Egypt) is a visual artist and performer interested in deconstructing and understanding space through subjective personal narratives. Sensation, states of being, and attention are at the core of her practice that includes site-specific performances and writing.
Sara Médiouni (b.1989, Morocco) is a documentary filmmaker and film curator who uses visual poetry as a mean to deconstruct both the representation of social realities in film and their reception by an audience.
Shaymaa Shoukry (b. 1984, Egypt) is a dancer and choreographer interested in repetition as movement and a transformative technique, and the resilience of the body through endurance. She explores the body’s potentials and energies through actions such as falling and fighting.
Peers
Golrokh Nafisi is an illustrator, animator, and puppet maker who experiments with performances in public space. Golrokh works through bodies and ideologies to imagine and shape new forms of collective action. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and the Tehran University of Art, and currently works between Tehran, Rome, and Amsterdam.
Jasmina Metwaly is a Cairo- and Berlin-based visual artist and filmmaker. She is a member of the Mosireen collective and the 858.ma media archive. She is interested in the points of intersection/division between single-channel image, video, and documentary filmmaking. Her work, using different materials including texts and archival material, often investigates the ways in which images transgress and how stories create stories, blurring the preconceived boundaries between documentation and fiction.
Nadim Bahsoun is a performer and dance educator from Lebanon, currently based in Paris. He has collaborated with many choreographers, most recently including Nadia Beugré, Fouad Boussouf, Radhouane El Meddeb, and Nancy Naous. As an actor and choreographer, he also performed in Chloé Mazlo’s film, Sous le ciel d’Alice, and Mohamed Shawky Hassan’s film Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day. Nadim’s contributions are concerned with body politics in movement practices, its multiple manifestations, and interlayered transmission mechanisms.
Noor Abuarafeh is a visual artist based between Jerusalem and Maastricht. She works primarily with video, performance, publications, and video installation. Her work addresses the memory, history, archive, and the possibilities of tracing absence. Noor’s text-based videos and performances questions the complexity of history, how is it shaped, constructed, made, perceived, visualized, and understood, and how all these elements are related to fact and fiction.
Sido Lansari is a Tangier-based visual artist and filmmaker, and is also the director of Cinémathèque de Tangier. Sido practices embroidery as a subversive artistic form challenging gender stereotypes. More generally, his work is interested in revealing what is often present yet hidden through word-image associations to reimagine and shift collective social assumptions.