© Ahmad Aiuby
Hold on tight: Meet AFAC’s 2025 Visual Arts grantees and the personal, political and social histories they’re documenting
4 / 9 / 2025

What does one do when one’s identity and the history that comes with it is being destroyed, torn apart? For many of the 24 projects selected as part of AFAC’s 2025 Visual Arts program, the answer has presented itself via a turn to the formally experimental, the narratively unusual and the oral and mythic as means of holding on to the history that surrounds us.

This holding on — for projects documenting hard realities like the geographic and sociological changes of Gaza’s refugee camps to the imaginative projects that pose meditations on the balance between permanence and transience as figured on a grandmother’s grave flowers — is a way of asserting agency, a way of resisting against forms of domination both big and small.

Projects find possibilities for building archives in traditional sources, for example the visual materials that document the life and work of a pioneering woman working in Egypt’s early documentary film scene. But they also turn to unusual and more marginal sources: video calls, recorded conversations over a game of backgammon, indigenous knowledge of water or the sediments contained in the maqams of Arabic music. The projects put forward by the 16 individual artists and eight institutions and collectives are united in the importance they place on context-centric, local and community-specific approaches, with several trying to create openings for different communities. That can take the form of physical space – exhibitions, workshops, cultural centers reimagined – or something less tangible, as in short animations for children affected by war.

Over the course of the application window, AFAC received 379 applications that were shared with readers committees for a first evaluation. The committees included Rayya Badran (Lebanon), Jumana Manna (Palestine), Malak Helmy (Egypt), Amin Alsaden (Iraq), Toleen Touq (Jordan) and Randa Maroufi (Morocco). The applications that passed this stage were then submitted to a committee of independent jurors.

The 2025 jury was made up of Algerian artist Amina Menia, Lebanese academic Yasmine Nachabe Taan and Palestinian artist Benji Boyadgian. At the end of their meeting, the jurors issued the following statement, summarizing their impressions and their rationale for their selections:

    “The Visual Arts applications received for the 2025 cycle reflected a wide range of themes and geographic diversity, from the Maghreb to the Levant, with a notable concentration of submissions from Palestine.

    Across the board, most applicants engaged with the shifting political realities of the region with great dignity and reserve, responding to conditions of genocide, war, displacement and migration.

    Two recurring themes, identity and archives, point to an urgent need to confront the systemic erasure of collective memories, the destruction of material culture and the dissolution of the social fabric of the Arab world caused by decades of imposed imperial wars. Many of the proposed projects wrestled with unresolved colonial, racial and patriarchal legacies and strove to confront hegemonic discourses, foregrounding lived experience and resurfacing historical events and figures in order to assert agency over the narrative.

    There was also a strong presence of works that conceptualized alternative imaginaries of the Arab world, remembering collective heritages and relations by delving into borderless traditions and shared aesthetics, or drawing from the perspective of oral history, ritual and mythology.

    In light of the political context in the region, the proposals showcased how artists are grappling with the past in order to represent a horizon, to imagine alternative futures.

    However, despite this richness, the committee noted a relative absence of proposals addressing environmental concerns or community-based, collaborative practices.

    In our selection process, we aimed to uphold a commitment to diversity, not only in geography and demographics, but in modes of thinking, artistic strategies, mediums and knowledge production. We prioritized decentralization and distribution of the sensible by seeking to support artists and initiatives from underrepresented contexts and communities that often lack access to funding opportunities.

    The quality of the artistic production remained central to our evaluation, but we approached it with awareness of available tools, different aesthetic approaches and forms of expression that resist imposed standards and instead strive to assess proposals through context-specific frameworks. We valued projects that make visible what has long been suppressed or ignored, especially those that recover silenced histories, preserve endangered archives, and address urgent political and social conditions. We were also attentive to proposals that sustain marginalized artistic communities, that engage with the local as a space of invention, and that work to keep culture-specific practices alive. Throughout the process, we remained cautious not to reproduce the Western gaze, reflecting critically on the institutional agendas behind both the applications and our own positions as jurors.”

The selected projects