The Fikra Designer-in-Residence Program is an annual design residency program aimed at international and U.A.E. based designers who seek to conduct design research and delve into an experimental process of making. The program is designed to encourage the creation of new work and engage in intellectual discourse relating to contemporary design practice and visual culture.
Garreth Chan
Garreth is a transdisciplinary artist from Hong Kong who focuses on the intersection of sound, text, and video. He holds a BA in Music and Sociology from NYU Abu Dhabi. Garreth worked at a film company as a producer, film colorist, and audio engineer before deciding to explore freelancing. His work in film and theater has premiered in Amman, New York,London, Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, and Budapest, among others. He has also published workin Postscript Magazine, Backslash Lit, Mixed Mag, and others. He is most interested in notions of silence, chaos, and the mundane.
Riad Salameh
Riad Salameh is a Lebanese researcher and art practitioner with a graphic design, art mediation, and media arts cultures background. His work and research often follow a praxis method that uses micro-transformations to respond to the urgency of collective socio-economic transformations. Looking into the ownership of bodies in cyberspaces, investigating internet capital and physiological needs of the everyday, he critically examines economy and its interlink to biopower. His interests relate to the abstraction of the physical and digital self through performance, web navigation, irony, humor, and intimacy. He has exhibited in Lebanon, Denmark, Georgia, England, Pakistan, and online. He also was a speaker at the 2020 Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts (DRHA) conference as part of DocPerfrom4, and his writing was published in Body, Space & Technology (BST).
Xiaoji Song
Xiaoji is a writer, researcher, and creative practitioner from Wuhan, China, and currently based in Germany. She is a student of MA Global Communication at the University of Erfurt, learning about global comparative media and communication research. With a bachelor’s in gender and diversity studies (HSRW, Kleve) and some additional courses in cognitive science, her practices are mainly on migration and related social changes in a networked digital society – ranging from theatre, multimedia journalism, to critical design in China, Germany, and the Netherlands, collaborating with local networks, governmental institutions, and NGOs.