Learn more about our residents' Christian, Vipin, Marika, and Smita's research observations from their time in the city: find photographs and notes from visits to museums and abandoned archaeological sites, automatic drawings guided by findings from the urban landscape, and snippets of conversations from newly-formed networks of allyship.

Presentations begin at 7PM followed by conversations & refreshments. The research display will remain on view till 8.30PM.

Biographies

Christian Sleiman is a Lebanese artist based in Beirut. His practice examines different methods of food production; from foraging to industrial agriculture. Through fabulated menu sets, the research tackles the issues of food sovereignty and global dependency by looking into historical events, political and cultural forces that reveal larger transitive relations in the global food system. His current focus is the impact of western culture on the rise of the Mediterranean diet, and its implications on local cuisine.

Marika Sardar is a consultant and independent scholar who has held curatorial positions at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, The San Diego Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has published on the architecture, paintings and textiles of India, and has created a number of exhibitions and permanent gallery installations relating to her specialties of South Asian and Islamic art. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Smita Urmila Rajmane is a public intervention artist, performer and educator. "The major themes of Smita's work deal with societal norms that arise from class/caste and gender discrimination, communal violence, the projections of hate and the differences that pervade today’s world. Her work deals with researching, unravelling and highlighting these issues through archival installations and public performances. She is building curriculums and curating shows for school students to build teaching learning spaces focused on social conscious pedagogical approaches. She has done performances and public installations titled ‘The battle of Ram-Rajya’, ‘Smash the Brahmanical patriarchy’ and ‘The Ambedkar Age Digital bookmobile’ in various cities and towns in India as well as in Europe.

Vipin Vijay, multiple award-winning filmmaker and film academic is an alumnus of Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute, Kolkata. He has been engaged in his search for new cinematic forms since 2000 working in the domain of creative documentary, film essay, fiction feature film and video art. Apart from widely shown in film festivals across the world, like Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, Oberhausen, São Paulo, Nantes, Montreal, Japan, Vladivostok , his works have also been exhibited in art museums like the Serpentine Gallery, London and the Ullens Centre for Contemporary art (UGCA) Beijing.The prestigious Oberhausen International Film Festival, Germany 2015 honoured him with a specially curated retrospective of his works. He was the ‘Film Maker in Focus’ at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala, in 2017.

Alserkal Arts Foundation hosts two residency cycles per year. Since these began in 2017, it has hosted 34 artists and researchers from multiple disciplines. The foundation welcomes practitioners from all fields of academic or practice-led inquiry, supporting critical and intellectually curious projects that impact the regional cultural sphere. Learn more.