Sarah Shamash is a media artist working in documentary, film, installation, video, web and mobile medias. Born in Vancouver, Canada, Shamash completed a BA in Film Production at the University of British Columbia. She moved to Paris in 2001, where she lived, worked and studied for five years; completing an MA in Cinema, and an MFA in Fine Arts at Paris VIII, University of Saint Denis. While in Paris she began exhibiting her work in art venues and film festivals while pursuing her creative production at artist residencies, including Vancouver, Toronto, Salvador, Banff, Sao Paulo and, most recently, Amman, Jordan. Informed by cinema, her current work engages socio and psycho geographies through the exploration of specific places, people and mapping strategies that convey personal and experiential knowledge through everyday life. She is currently based in Vancouver, Canada.  

 

Nidal El Khairy is an illustrator living in Amman, Jordan. After completing a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, he moved to Montreal, Canada where he spent four and half years working on political art in a context of local  grass-roots social movements such as the Coalition against the Deportation of Palestinian refugees, No One Is Illegal and Solidarity Across Boarders. He also had solo and group exhibitions in Montreal, Toronto, Tokyo, Beirut, Amman and Caracas

Born in Lebanon in 1982, Lynn Kodeih lives and works in Beirut. In her work, she uses video and photography as well as the raw body of the performer, as she experiments with new media. 

She acted in and directed several performances including Coma, Hamlet Machine, Regrets of the Statue Man, and The Invisible City. 

Lynn is fascinated by faces, obliteration, narration and testimony. In her installations Triptych – I am the Martyr #187 and Variations on an Icon, she reflects on monuments and martyrdom conceptualizing the human body, a task she attempts to pursue in 160 Feet Under Pure Blue Sea which she will present in Makan.

Kristine Khouri is a researcher, writer and photographer currently based in Beirut, Lebanon after spending a year in Amman (2007-2008) as a Fulbright fellow investigating visual art practice and production, specifically institutions and structures and identity production. She worked as a researcher for Walid Raad on his current project "Scratching on Things You Could Disavow: A History of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art," and with Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige on the the Haigazian Rocket Society project. With Rasha Salti, she cofounded "The History of Arab Modernities in the Visual Arts," a long term research project investigating the realm of production, exhibition, critical engagement and consumption of modern art in the region from the 1950s until the 1980s.

 

Aisha Jamal is a filmmaker, occasional curator and university instructor. Born in Kandahar, Afghanistan Jamal spent her high- school years in Vancouver, Canada and moved to Toronto to complete her PhD in contemporary German cinema. During this time, she shot and directed her first documentary, Dolls and Bombs, as well as curating various film series and exhibits. Her main interest, academically and artistically, lie in conceptual and theoretical issues of migration and Diaspora. She is currently based in Toronto, Canada.

 

 

During their residency period at Makan, London based artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White continued to explore ways in which the philosophy underpinning open source software can be mapped onto creative production, looking at methods of free distribution and unlimited access, in contrast to many traditional models of art production: closed distribution and the limited edition.Whilst in residence at Makan, Eileen and Ben were researching Jordanian copyright and working with material that had fallen into the public domain. They worked with an out-of-copyright Jordanian film to create a new version for free distribution and are hoping to remix recordings of traditional Jordanian music to produce a new copyleft licensed CD (licensed Creative Commons, Jordan) in collaboration with musicians in Amman.
The residency is a cooperation between Makan and Gasworks, for more information:
www.gasworks.org.uk/international/
www.gasworks.org.uk

 

 

Bio

Eileen Simpson and Ben White often work outside the gallery, preferring to work in other public spaces: on-line, in clubs, magazines, shops and cinemas. Recently they established Open Music Archive http://www.openmusicarchive.org a collaborative initiative to source, digitise and distribute out of copyright sound recordings. Their recent projects include: Outlet, (Coleman’s Project Space, London) Nought-to-Sixty (ICA, London); Declose (Disclosures, Gasworks, London); Stop. Move (Loose Booty, London/Geneva/Zurich); Clips Blips and Loops (Who Makes And Owns Your Work, Stockholm); Free-to-air (Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK); Screen Tests (in collaboration with Marysia Lewandowska & Neil Cummings British Art Show 6), and Leverage (Futuresonic, Manchester)

After years of transitory home visits to Amman and the Middle East, constantly drawn back and inspired by its complexities, Toleen got the opportunity to spend a residency period at Makan for open research. After some time researching and rediscovering the environment, the artist came up with an idea for an installation. 4th Grade is a collaborative interactive video installation exhibited in Makan; the installation copied a classroom: a white space, desks and chairs. The installation received production support from Greyscale.

Mohamed Salah came for a residency in Makan to work on his script approaching illegal immigrants travelling from North Africa to South Europe. He realised during his residency that Amman is different from his expectations, this young city is built around immigrants, and accordingly it became exciting in his eyes. He met characters of various backgrounds and nationalities, who maybe have different conditions that those of his protagonists, however similar in the fact that they too replace their countries of birth with others. He also found out that travelling between the Arab countries is valuable and reveals the differences between people and their heritage, and how little one people know about the other despite the assumption of knowledge.

Mohamed Salah screened his most recent film “Islands” in Makan during the residency

As an artist and an architect Saba tries through her work to tackle different socio-political realities through a critical discursive understanding that involves investigating the dialogues created in everyday urbanism, the landscapes of cities, and place as a social product. The residency in Cairo, which lasted the duration of one month, was an attempt to observe the city fabric in comparison to the fabric of Amman. This allowed her to develop her understanding of place making processes, and to study how spaces are made and unmade through social contestations over place representation.

 

The products of this observation, as an extension of an ongoing research in Amman, vary in form including maps, illustrations, paintings and installations. 

In his first residency, Mohammad joined Makan as a blogger, and the creator of www.khobbeizeh.com. As a result of the residency, Mohammad and Makan collaborated on the project entitled Sha3shaboneh.  Sha3shaboneh was a blogging meeting which invited the public to presentations by dedicated local bloggers and blog experts.

 

Mohammad alQaq released his first single entitled Saqatat Sahwan, his lyrics and voice and music composed by Yousef Kawar. Towards taking this song further, Mohammad joined Makan for a second residency; the project will include a video, an exhibition and a DVD with a booklet.

 

For more information:

hqaq@yahoo.com

www.khobbeizeh.com

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