The Delfina Foundation provides opportunities for artists to explore new connections and collaborations with colleagues, communities and institutions based across a network of cultural and urban centres in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
From the 'Village Girl's Day' series, Waheeda Malullah, 2008
Waheeda Malullah
Waheeda Malullah’s photography, installation and video-based work explores childhood playfulness, cultural rules, and religion.
In her recent work, Waheeda uses sports and competition to identify the rules of the social game, and expose the situations in which grown-ups are all losers. In Play (2006, video), Football, Bahrain's national sport, is used as a model and a structure for the staging of Waheeda’s feelings and the projection of her desires.
Waheeda Malullah graduated from RIAM, Bahrain, in 2002. In 2005 she was international resident at the Towhouse Gallery (Cairo, Egypt). In 2007, she participated in numerous exhibitions, in Spain, Athens, Berlin, Copenhagen, Stuttgart and Paris. Waheeda currently lives and works in Barhain.
from the series The Expulsion from Paradise, 2006
Ixone Sádaba
Ixone Sadaba's carefully composed photographs explore the body as a location of inner and outer conflict. Her earlier performance-based work was strongly influenced by 1970s body-art and feminist practices, including the work of Marina Abramovic, Gina Pane and Laurie Anderson.
Ixone studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Basque Country University, Bilbao, and Antonio de Nebrija University, Spain, before graduating from ICP New-York in 2006. She has shown her work internationally, in venues such as the National Museum Reina Sofia (Spain), Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao, Spain) and Witzenhausen Gallery (New-York and Amsterdam). She currently lives and works in Bilbao, Spain.
Wafa Hourani
Wafa Hourani is an emerging visual artist whose practice encompasses elements of film-making, photography, architecture and graphic design. In recent work, such as Photolife (2006), Wafa playfully investigates the epistemological possibilities offered by the photographic medium, and the nature of the mimetic relationship between art and reality. In his Future City series, Wafa revisits the utopian genre to produce architectural models of major cities 50 years from now, including sociological, environmental and behavioural parameters in his subjective and emotional forecasting model.
Wafa Hourani is a recipient of the 2007 Delfina Foundation's Riwaq Biennale Resident Artist Award, resulting from the collaboration between the Delfina Foundation and the A.M. Qattan Foundation. The Riwaq Biennale takes place in Ramallah, Palestine.
Manal Mahamid
Manal Mahamid works across video, installation and photography. A reminder of the transitory character of human life, Manal Mahamid’s work reassesses linear understandings of time, whilst forming a hopeless attempt to pin down the ephemeral existence of all things, caught in the infinite process of being constantly replaced by the immediate present. Manal gained a Scholarship of Excellence from the University of Haifa in 2006, where she recently completed her M.F.A.
She was shortlisted for the A.M. Qattan Young Artist of the Year Award in 2005. Manal is a recipient of the 2007 Delfina Foundation's Riwaq Biennale Resident Artist Award, resulting from the collaboration between the Delfina Foundation and the A.M. Qattan Foundation. The Riwaq Biennale takes place in Ramallah, Palestine.
Lost in Space, 2003, Installation Espacio Abisal, Bilbao.
Wall Screen / Dreamland - Ismael Iglesias
Ismael Iglesias blends the achievements of traditional pictorial avant-gardism with the computer screens’ opaque luminescence. In his practice, Ismael takes elements of graphic and digital design to create textures and screens, which, installed in the exhibition room, question the boundaries of architecture and of the paintings themselves. Whilst deriving from Ismael’s systematic search within the newest technology, and assimilating elements of VJing and popular culture, the intention is to comprehend the articulation – and speed of fragmented images, as well as their relation to the exhibition space.
Ismael Iglesias was born in 1974 in Durango, Spain.
He has won numerous prizes in Spain, and has recently exhibited his work at ARCO – Madrid, Artium Museum, Vitoria and Galeria ADN– Barcelona.
He currently lives and works in Bilbao, Spain.
Yazan Al-Khalili
The identity of a community is imprinted on the physical environment that supports and sustains it. Yazan Al-Khalili’s work seeks to debunk the popular cliches carried by Orientalist representations of the East by focusing upon spaces that have been historically transformed or carry the signs of change and modernity. An attempt to frame the physical environment as a cultural artefact, Margins highlights how collective experiences and lives are visually evoked within such spaces, and how narratives of community coalesce with architectural space:
“As an architect I became concerned in the visual manifestations that are created in the cities I have lived in. These manifestations result from the interaction between humans and their living spaces, how space changes human culture and how human culture changes the architecture of the space. Using photography as a tool to explore the city, in its architectural and social environments, I try to position the city’s complexity and layers into visual form”.
Eugenio Ampudia
Eugenio Ampudia is one of the most accomplished video / digital-based artists in Spain whose artworks are held in the most important Spanish museums. The ARTIUM - Museum of Contemporary Art held a well-acclaimed retrospective exhibition in 2007 that will travel to Europe and America. In 2008, Eugenio received the ARCO’s Critics Award for Best Spanish Artist. Eugenio’s video work often re-creates real and imaginary spaces using visual imagery to explore our emotional connections to them.
Noel Wallace
Noel Wallace is a choreographer and dancer who made British Ballet history as the English National Ballet's first Black dancer. Noel also danced with the Houston Ballet and Béjart Ballet and produced numerous dance projects with Brian Eno, Christopher Bruce, the photographer Dennis Morris and David Fielding. His palette for expression is much wider than contemporary dance with his work often lacing cutting-edge contemporary dance with high classical articulation, film/animation and extraordinary sound.