Iman Issa and Lina Laraki have been selected to join the Art Explora Residency Programme for 2023.
Every year, the Art Explora foundation, in collaboration with the Cité internationale des arts, welcomes about twenty residents – artists, art collectives and researchers – from all over the world. This residency programme offers the possibility for artists and researchers to carry out research and create work in the heart of Paris, in collaboration with the French artistic and professional scene. The works of the residents will focus on the theme of scientific and technological exploration and it addresses today’s most pressing social and environmental challenges.
Committed to working with public and private actors to support creative initiatives and the circulation of culture in society at large, Art Explora joined forces with the Cité internationale des arts in 2021.
Iman Issa and Lina Laraki are two African artists (living in the diaspora) amongst the 12 artists selected from 11 different countries for the first session of the 2023 edition of the residency. In March, the selected creatives will arrive at the Montmartre site of the Cité internationale des arts for the residency which will last from three to six months.
About Iman Issa
Born in 1979 in Cairo, Iman Issa is an Egyptian multi-disciplinary artist whose practice is concerned with the systems that govern the rules of perception and allow for the generation of meaning. Her work has been widely shown in venues including KW Institute of Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2021), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, 2017), MoMA (New York, 2017), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2016), MACBA (Barcelona, 2015). She has also participated in the Whitney Biennial (New York, 2019), the 12th Sharjah biennial (2011), the 8th Berlin Biennial (2014), and the 7th Gwangju biennial (2018) among others. She is a recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise (2017), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2015), HNF-MACBA Award (2012), and the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2013). She is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Her residency project, “I, the Protagonist” explores how a definable notion of self and other intersects with the history of portraiture and its interpretation as a form historically associated with the representation of a visual and conceptual coherence of a figure. These notions will be explored in relation to the shifting individuality on which portraiture is based and by examining representations of existing and invented figures in the collections of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
About Lina Laraki
Lina Laraki was born in 1991 in Casablanca (Morocco). She is a film director and visual artist whose practice probes obscure themes exploring the ambivalence of nature and human experiences. She expands the experience of cinema through sensorial representations. Her films have been shown internationally, that includes Karama at 1:54 Art Fair, UK in 2017 – The Last Observer at Sheffield DocFest, UK in 2021, Halves Through Night at Fantasia IFF, Canada in 2022. Her latest film Shinigami was awarded the Renato & Christine Casciani prize (Around Video Art Fair) in France in 2022.
Her residency project, “Insolent Visions” is focused on the diverse mental states coupled with anatomical medicine in the face of institutional violence. She will examine the way madness was identified and treated in the great gloomy madhouse of La Salpêtrière in the 19th century, and relate it to our contemporary approach of what is considered marginal behaviours and mental disability. The core idea of this project lies in the diversion of the classification system of definitions of madness through elaborated characters, role plays and inverted situations in which narration becomes layered and complex. This new piece of work will be the continuation of her practice, which is led by rhizome thoughts on human deviances (social, behavioural or mental) and their marginalizations from functioning society.
