Artists in residence

Born in 1991 in Tunis, Chedly Atallah is an artist, architect and scenographer who lives and works in Paris. After studying Architecture in Tunis and then in Paris, he joined the Beaux-Arts de Paris where he forged a strong bond with Emmanuel Saulnier. They collaborate together in various projects such as the Alep edition, the book Beirut IN-SITU (Beaux-Arts edition) or the Almanac Les Ides de Mars.

His practice explores the geopolitical changes in the post-revolutionary Arab world. Mixing video, installations and sculptures, he questions the modalities of cohabitation of men with their images while being nourished by the current events of wars and revolts as in Libya, Syria, Palestine and Lebanon. In a process of image making, he deals with two essential notions that he draws from the memories of his deceased grandfather: those of doubling and blindness. It is through historical, architectural, religious and political layers that he creates fragments of visual and iconographic memories retracing migration through the stories of forms, reality and the imagined.

His work has been presented in France (Le Cent Quatre, Beaux-Arts de Paris, La Maréchalerie, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac…), Italy, Colombia, England, Czech Republic and Tunisia.   

“The six months of my residency allowed me to complete the first chapter of my Montauzan project, which ended with the solo show Drip Drop The Rain curated by Claire Luna at the Petite Galerie de la Cité.

This privileged time of a residency accompanied by a living grant and numerous round tables and meetings in a context as fragile as that of the pandemic allowed me to concentrate fully on my research while being surrounded by an international community of artists, architects, researchers and curators…“

Samaneh Atef, an Iranian visual artist born in 1989 in Bandar Abbas, lives and works in France. A self-taught artist, she initially studied computer engineering in Iran before devoting herself fully to her artistic practice from 2014 onwards.

Since then, she has developed a practice centred on drawing, painting and sculpture. Drawing has emerged as her primary medium, at the heart of a process rooted in observation and a constant dialogue with the living world. Her work explores the body as a space of resonance between memory and the unconscious, at the intersection of intimate experience and collective dimensions. Through repetition and a focus on states of suspension, she develops a visual language centred on forms in transformation. She exhibited for the first time in 2016 at the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art in Belgrade.

Upon her arrival in France, she was awarded a residency at the URDLA (Villeurbanne) in 2021, where she developed a body of work centred on printmaking.
From 2021 to 2024, she was supported by the association ‘Le Grand Large’, dedicated to supporting emerging artists. Her work has been shown internationally, notably at the Haus der Kunst (Munich) and the MUCEM (Marseille), as well as in several solo and group exhibitions across Europe and the United States.

In 2024, she was awarded first prize at EUWARD 9.