About
Residency + Research
Programmes
Common Room
Residency + Research
The sun-drenched studio spaces at Alserkal Avenue — based in the Foundation’s headquarters and designed by the UAE architectural collective ‘a hypothetical office’— host three residency cycles per year. The residency is research-led, focusing on generating discursive exchange and allowing local engagement with artistic and scholarly research and practice. Working closely with residents, we design each cycle based on shared interest, affinities and research goals, conceiving of the residency as an introduction to the region with the potential for longer-term engagement. Participants contribute to our community by developing and hosting programming accessible to wider publics. Residencies are open to researchers, writers, and artists, and are not limited to visual production. We welcome researchers from all fields of academic or practice-led enquiry with an interest in knowledge production and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Residents:
Iram Ghufran
Iram Ghufran is a filmmaker, researcher and educator based in New Delhi, India. Her work engages with speculative modes of storytelling, and her interests span the realm of techno spectral forms, nonhuman agency, micro practices of futurity and mythopoesis. Iram’s work has been screened widely within art and cinematic contexts including Experimenta India, Forum Expanded at Berlinale, Tate Modern, Hong-Gah Museum, Dhaka Art Summit, Arsenal 4 and Visible Evidence 21 among others. Iram has won several awards for her films including two National Film Awards (2012), Mary Kay First Prize at the International Women's Film Festival, Seoul (2012), and a special Jury Mention at SAARC Film Festival, Colombo (2016). She was short-listed for the Tim Hetherington Visionary Award (2016). Iram is currently working on her doctoral film and thesis at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, London.
Selection committee:
Pierre Bélanger
Pierre Bélanger (b 1971, Boston, USA) is a landscape architect, urban planner, author, and curator. He is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He is also a co-director of OPSYS, design-based, non-profit organization and works as an advisor to the US Army Corps of Engineers. He has a PhD in Urban Planning from the Wageningen University and a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard. He has published several books including Landscape as Infrastructure, Ecologies of Power, Going Live, Risk Ecologies, Wet Matter, Extraction Empire.