From the Archive | Spring 2025 Residency
Open Studios
Alserkal Arts Foundation Spring 2025 residents - artist Essa Grayeb, researcher İdil Akıncı,and curator Rana Anani opened up their studios and presented their research-led projects as part of their residency from February - April 2025.
In their research, archives emerge not as static records of the past, but as fluid sites of negotiation, shaping our everyday social and political spheres. Through a constellation of film footage, WhatsApp audio notes, photographs, found materials, postal stamps, and media clippings, the residents invite us to reflect on intergenerational experiences and our personal and collective memories.
Alserkal Arts Foundation hosts two residency cycles per year. Since these began in 2017, it has hosted 48 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 about the residency programme here.
Photos courtesy Niño Consorte / Seeing Things.
Public Programmes
Airports represent the current moment as interstitial spaces for transition, places of temporality where passengers remain passive; merely waiting for the future to arrive. In these anonymous zones solitude and individuality emerge as opposed to communality.
Anani explored this liminal time of uncertainty through the lens of Palestinian visual art, discussing works of artists such as Hani Zurob, Yazan Khalili, Tayseer Batniji, Emily Jacir, Mona Hatoum, Khalil Rabah and more.
Photos courtesy Niño Consorte / Seeing Things.
Click here to view the talk.
Grayeb reimagines found objects, footage, and sound, to create a world that oscillates between reality and fiction. With a particular interest in Pan-Arabism, his practice maps key moments in modern history through Arab popular culture.
In his talk, he took us through his ongoing research, featuring excerpts from his experimental videos—‘The Return of Osiris’, ‘My Whole Heart Is With You’, and ‘Suspended Dawn’.
Photos courtesy Niño Consorte / Seeing Things.
In this session led by Akıncı, we turned our attention to questions around retirement and aging, family support, and intergenerational relationships in the city. Through personal stories and broader reflections, we collectively considered the evolving meaning of home and belonging in later life.
Photos courtesy Kristina Sergeeva / Seeing Things.
Biographies
Essa Grayeb is a Palestinian visual artist and scholar whose practice spans video, photography, and installation. He works with existing objects, footage, and sounds, weaving between reality and fiction. A fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (2025–2026), Grayeb’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at De Appel in Amsterdam, the Jakarta Biennale (2024), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana and The Mosaic Rooms in London (2024), and the Palestinian Museum (2021). His films have screened at festivals and institutions such as the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (2024), the Arab Film Festival in San Diego (2021), and more.
Rana Anani is a curator, writer, and researcher on visual arts and culture. Her articles are published in several forums in Palestine and the region. She was the Head of Communication of the Palestinian Museum, the Project Manager of Qalandiya International 2018, the coordinator of the Palestinian Pavilion at Cannes Film Festival, and an Associate Curator of Sharjah Biennale 13 off-site project “Shifting Grounds” in Ramallah. Currently, she is the editor of the website of the Institute of Palestine Studies, Ramallah/Beirut.
İdil Akıncı joined the University of Edinburgh in September 2019 as an Assistant Professor. Her research interests and experience centre around the issues of national identity, citizenship and belonging in multicultural societies, with a focus on the Arab Gulf States. She holds a PhD in Migration Studies from the University of Sussex, where she explored the everyday experiences of national identity and citizenship by young Arab migrant communities and Emirati citizens in Dubai. İdil has taught a number of undergraduate courses in sociology, migration, human geography, and social anthropology both at the University of Sussex and Zayed University in Dubai.
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