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:
Wilf Speller
Artist
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė
Artist Duo
Liao Fei
Artist
Heaven Baek
Artist
Vitalij Strigunkov
Artist
Michela de Mattei
Artist
Mahan Moalemi
Writer and Curator
Željka Blakšić
Artist
Lama Altakruri
Artist
Yaminay Chaudhri
Artist
Mochu
Artist
Mona Ayyash
Artist
Civil Architecture
Architects
Ali El-Darsa
Artist
Suzy Halajian
Curator and Writer
Mandy Merzaban
Artist, Curator and Writer
Laura Metzler
Curator
Kosmas Nikolaou
Artist
Franziska Pierwoss
Artist
Jaret Vadera
Artist
Michael John Whelan
Artist
METASITU
Artists, curators, coordinators
Aarti Sunder
Artist, writer, curator
Balqis Al Rashed
Artist
Sashikanth Thavudoz
Artist
Invernomuto
Artist duo
Wilf Speller
Wilf Speller (1991) is a visual artist and filmmaker, born and based in London, United Kingdom. Wilf’s work emerges from a research and writing practice that reflects on future imaginaries and their representation. Of late, their work primarily focuses on the ideological and aesthetic dogmas that shape the spatial politics of late capitalism and the anthropocene. Wilf is a 2020 graduate of the Dutch Art Institute (DAI). They have exhibited internationally in both festivals and galleries including Broad Art Museum MSU, Michigan, USA (2018); IMPAKT Festival, Utrecht, Netherlands (2018); the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2016); HMKV, Dortmund, Germany (2016); and The Photographer's Gallery, London, UK (2015).
Selection committee:
Pierre Bélanger
Landscape Architect and Urban Planner
iLiana Fokanaki
Curator, Writer and Educator
César García-Alvarez
Founding Executive and Artistic Director of The Mistake Room (TMR)
Raja‘a Khalid
Artist
Monica Narula
Member of Raqs Media Collective
Filipa Ramos
Writer and Editor
Uzma Z. Rizvi
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at the Pratt Institute
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.
