Masaha Residency:  Cycle 12

A three-month visual arts residency in Riyadh, exploring what is carried over and what is lost each time experience passes through a tool. 

About Misk Art Residencies 

Misk Art Residencies aims to support artistic development and practice by promoting the possibilities of meaningful exchange between the local community and the global cultural landscape. 

The Masaha Residency is designed to cultivate the art sector by facilitating discourse, research, and experimentation around themes that concern the local community. 

Theme: What Remains in the Crossing 

This cycle invites artists to examine what experience becomes when it passes through the tools we use to create, translate, and share it, and what, in that process, changes. 

Digital tools have reshaped how we form and communicate experience. A story gains reach through a platform, but loses something in tone. A place captured on camera is not the same as a place lived in. A feeling, once processed and shared, may circulate widely while growing distant from its source.  

The digital is no longer separate from lived experience. It is one of the ways experience is shaped and expressed, and yet every act of translation changes something. The question is: what exactly? 

At the center of this inquiry is the artist, the one who brings to a tool what the tool cannot generate on its own: gesture, hesitation, memory, doubt. 

Artists are invited to work with digital tools, including AI, photography, video, sound, and generative media, as spaces for genuine experimentation rather than production, drawing from personal memory, inherited stories, or lived experience, and asking what each becomes when it passes through.  

“What Remains in the Crossing” is ultimately an invitation: to move through the digital with intention, and to bring to it what only you can: your context, your curiosity, your doubt, and your imagination. 

Program Structure 

1. Weekly mentorship sessions  
2. Development of project and budget proposals  
3. Trips to cultural/historical sites in Riyadh  
4. Public engagement through open studios and resident-led educational programing  
5. Networking sessions  
6. A critique session with external and internal collaborators 
7. Final group exhibition showcase, funded by Misk Art Institute  

Residents will gain 

1. Time and space to focus on researching a new theme-related project  
2. External and internal experts to advise, provide feedback, and critique your research and project  
3. Long-lasting contacts within the Saudi and international arts network  
4. Exposure to and from important members of the art community (such as artists, press, curators, etc)  
5. A group showcase exhibiting your new body of work  
6. Professional development as an artist  

Who's it for? 

Full-time visual and digital artists from all artistic disciplines who meet one or more of the following: 

1. 3+ years of fine arts experience 
2. 3+ years of exhibiting history 
3. Actively practicing and engaging in the arts 

Applicants must be fully committed to prioritizing this three-month program, with no exceptions. 

What we provide 

1. Roundtrip flight to Riyadh 
2. Visas for Saudi Arabia 
3. Accommodation (for those based outside of Riyadh) 
4. Private studio 
5. Production budget 

Artwork Credit: Marco Conti Sikic, Masaha residncy Cycle 10. 2025