Part of Alserkal Art Week
Spend an afternoon at the Alserkal Arts Foundation studios with our Fall residents: sound artist Jad Saliba, writer and visual artist Sinzo Aanza, academic researcher and mixed-media artist Thlana Bazik, and filmmaker Pallavi Paul. Encounter techno fossil sonic fragments inspired by the Palestinian Tarweedah, goods from across the Indian Ocean sourced from Deira’s souks, visuals notes while in transit in a sleepless city, and ephemeral polaroids that speak of transcendental lives.
Biographies
Jad Saliba (born 1984, Beirut) works primarily in sound. A former Oud player, co-founded ensemble ‘Mayal’ in 2010, performing renaissance music of early 20th century Egypt. Saliba was also part of ‘Irtijal’ Beirut’s collective of artists, playing alongside prominent members and other international
experimental musicians. Graduated in master’s at the Institute of Sonology in 2020. His current work explores experimental drum machines, contemplating on alternative club music and online community radio broadcasts.
Sinzo Aanza is a Congolese artist whose work focuses on the radicality of fiction. In 2007, Luhindi K. Sinzomene created Sinzo Aanza, a radical fiction to whom he assigns the responsibility for the interactions between his creations, first literary and then visual, and the equally frictional social
frameworks in which the encounter, discussion and projections around all the other inventions developed by men to frame life, its understanding, organisation and projections become possible. Aanza (b. 1990 in Goma, DR Congo) lives and works in Kinshasa, DR Congo.
A multi-media artist and an academic researcher from Mizoram, Lalthlanchhuaha a.k.a., Bazik Thlana defines himself as a socially conscious eccentric-owning a conscious refusal of a centrally defined axis as well as an unconventionality to his practice. His body of works are informed by research and writing with interdisciplinary works which includes painting and drawing, installation, artistic performance and the curatorial. He makes artist’s book, zines and comics and occasionally writes poetry. He enjoys challenging his audience and inciting people with his art, provoking thoughts and originating dialogue.
Pallavi Paul is a filmmaker, film scholar and artist based in New Delhi. Her practice speaks to poetic exploration of cultural histories, questioning the limits of speculation and facticity and evidence. Paul is also engaged in thinking about ideas of the archive, tensions between document and documentary and the implication of trace within these openings. She has received her PhD in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Paul’s film, ‘The Blind Rabbit’ premiered at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2020. Paul’s work has been exhibited in venues including Tate Modern, London (2013); AV Festival, New Castle (2018, 2016), Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon (2018), Savvy Contemporary (2019), Contour Biennale, Mechelen (2017), New Alphabet School, HKW (2020).Her most recent solo exhibition 'How Love Moves' is on view at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin.
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.