Alwasm & Althurayya

2025 at mmag witnessed many shifts and transformations, new projects emerging and others concluding, artists coming and going through the spaces, allowing the foundation, as always, to become a place of encounter, familiarity, and exchange for artists from across the Arab world and beyond.

The Artist in Residence program began in the spring and extended across the seasons, hosting eight artists, each coming from different horizons, brought together by a desire for research, experimentation, and an open dialogue with the space. They were joined throughout their journey by a multitude of artists in the houseguest program. Out of sight, mmag pulsed with life, hidden within the city, with ideas and encounters slowly fermenting in the minds and bodies of those who lived and worked in the institution’s spaces, under the stars and between the trees.

As the year draws to a close, we reveal Alwasm & Althurayya, a gathering that gestures towards both an ending and a continuation: traces of a process shaped by trials, conversations, and shared living. It arrives not as a point of conclusion but one of slow transformations, of echoes, unspoken bonds, and motions that we hope will continue expanding.

We invite you to join us over two days, December 5 and 6, from 4 to 9 pm. Participants in the Artist in Studio residency will open their spaces to the public, offering a chance to discover the practices, projects, and ideas that emerged throughout the year.

Alwasm & Althurayya: in perpetual unfolding offers us an opportunity to learn about the resident artists’ approaches, in the everyday poetics of Abeer Aref; in Ahmad Al-Daoud’s revealing satire of colonial remnants; in Akka Hamdan’s movements, where the personal becomes a site for collective questioning and the political is located within the intimate. In Faisal Karadsheh’s chemical transformations of matter; in Gabriel Possamai’s photographic inquiries into the colonial undercurrents of modernity; in Hana Safwat’s critique of global power structures through moving image; in the magical and healing practices of Raghad Resres; and in Jumana Azzam’s literary metaphors and wondrous experiments with writing and books, we find practices that do not merely contemplate the past, but reorder it, opening portals towards imagining a future otherwise.

This event also invites the mmag community to a public program featuring various interventions and contributions in performance, sound, and visual works by: Saeed Askar, Khaled Zghoul, Haya Dakwar, Dalia Kury and Ola El-Khalidi Accompanied with: Ali Al Omari, Bayan Kiwan, Zeina Hamarneh, Ramsey Kattan and Ahmad Masoud. Villa Abu Al-Huda will host Presentation of the results of the Countermap project, produced and presented by makāna collective. as well as the 2025 Artists' Film International Festival, hosted in our newest space.