Visual artist Shada Safadi, artist researcher Mhamad Safa, emerging scholar Jalila Haider, and artist Masaru Iwai will present their research-led projects at Alserkal Arts Foundation, Warehouse 51, followed by refreshments and conversation.

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.

Biographies

Shada Safadi was born in 1982 in Majdal Shams, the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. In 2004, Safadi completed a two-year class in painting and etching at Adham Ismail Institute, Damascus, following which she graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from Damascus University in 2005. A founding member of Fateh Al Mudarris Center for Arts and Culture in Golan Heights, Safadi has participated in multiple exhibitions, including a solo exhibition at Fateh Al Mudarris Center for Arts and Culture, Majdal Shams in 2006. In addition, her work has been featured in exhibitions in Damascus and Aleppo in Syria; Jerusalem, Ramallah, Birzeit, and Bethlehem in the West Bank; Umea in Sweden; and London in the UK. Recently, she participated in the Syrian Cultural Caravan, with exhibitions in France, Germany, Norway, Spain and Belgium.

Mhamad Safa is a musician, architect, and researcher in sonic matters, based between London and Beirut. His work focuses on multi-scalar spatial conditions and their sonic make-ups. He explores their intersections with aural legacies of traditional and subcultural practices, as well as environments of conflict and violence. He graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths and is currently a PhD candidate in International Law at the University of Westminster. He is an Associate Lecturer in Media Studies at the Royal College of Art.

Jalila Haider is the first female lawyer from the Hazara community, an ethnic minority in Pakistan's Balochistan Province. The emerging researcher addresses human rights in her legal and academic work. As a feminist and human rights activist, she has earned several national and international accolades and recognitions, including the State Department's International Women of Courage Award (IWOC) 2020. In 2019, she was named in the BBC’s 100 Women, a list of the world's most influential women, in recognition of her work for women's and human rights in her country.

Iwai Masaru, born in 1975 in Kyoto, lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Masaru’s film, installation and performance focus on the mundane act of cleaning and cleansing, revealing their underlying social and symbolic meanings. He participated in Seeing as Though Touching: Contemporary Japanese Photography Vol.19 at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2022; at the Yokohama Triennale with Afterglow, 2020; Reborn-Art Festival in Miyagi, 2017; New “Artists Today” Exhibition 2018 Unfixed Perspectives at the Yokohama Civic Art Gallery, 2018; and others.

Read more about their research interests here.