5800 Miles to Support Five Artistic Projects’ Mobility Between Within the Second Cycle of 2025 Zad: Miles for Connection
Ettijahat—Independent Culture is happy to announce the grantees of the second round of this year’s Zad: Miles for Connection programme. Zad is a support framework designed to promote mobility and communication for artists from the Arab region living in Europe. Its main objective is to develop their artistic and professional path. Additionally, Zad assists artists in reaching and engaging with different audiences, all while enhancing their contributions to public life within the cities and countries where they reside and work.
The jury selected nine art projects, from categories of visual and performing arts. The artists will travel 5800 miles across Europe, presenting their work in new spaces and meeting audiences they have never met before.
Zad continues to accept applications from artists throughout the year. The next application review date is on October 16, 2025. The jury committee will evaluate all applications received before these dates.
The jury committee, which also evaluated the applications received in the first round of Zad: Miles for Connection, was composed of curator and cultural director Dunya Al Dahan from Syria, theatre director Nora Amin from Egypt, and researcher and cultural director Krystel Khoury from Lebanon.
Supported Projects
Jeries Abu Jaber – Palestinian theatre director and scenographer | 550 miles between Prague, Czechia and Kozarišče, Slovenia
Jeries will participate in the Floating Castle Festival, showcasing his work, If Only I'd Forget You After One Last Dance, which explores feelings of loss, pain, love, and forgiveness, evoking his memories of Palestine to make his body the center of the narrative. The performance contemplates the point of friction between political pain and personal loss.
Hala Alnaji – Palestinian multidisciplinary architect and researcher | 2630 miles between Malmo, Sweden and Athens, Greece
Hala will be presenting her project, "A Displaced Glossary," at the Lofos Art Project space as part of the Gaza Biennale in Athens. It's a wall installation that documents a language born from experiences of displacement and genocide after October 7, 2023. The work reconfigures Palestinian vocabulary as emotional maps and spaces of resistance.
Khaled Alwarea – Syrian architect and multidisciplinary artist | 1480 miles between Marseille, France and Berlin, Germany
Khaled will participate in a residency at Kunsthalle Below, after which he will showcase his work, Syria’s Queer Memory, a documentary and artistic project that preserves the stories of queer Syrians before and after the 2011 uprising. Through photography, video interviews, and personal archives, the project reconstructs a nearly-erased history that is carried in exile by a dispersed community.
Aisha Nour – Egyptian Artist | 940 miles between Drăgășani, Romania and Lecce, Italy
Aisha will be participating in the Baroque Blue art residency, where she will develop and present her visual arts project, Blue Leaning. The project reflects the artist’s experience across different cities, Alexandria, Beirut, and Saudi Arabia, and her constant quest to find an artistic thread that ties these disparate worlds together.
Tempodesert – Saudi-Egyptian performance-based collaboration | 175 miles between Rotterdam, Netherlands and multiple destinations in the Netherlands
Tempodesert, composed of Fai Aldhukair and Mohamed Abdelkarim will participate in a residency at W139 to develop Desert Without Sand. The work came out of the urgency to negotiate the multiplicity of the desert as a space of fugitivity, resistance, hermeticism, erasure, and emergence.
Jury Statement
The jury reviewed travel and mobility requests from artists from the Arab region residing in Europe within the Zad programme, noting the rich diversity in the submitted projects, spanning theatre, dance, music, cinema, and visual arts. This diversity reflects the diverse and intersecting artistic experiences of Arab artists in Europe. It is the product of the experiences of several generations with varied artistic visions and ideas, clearly demonstrating the difficulty of reducing the Arab cultural scene in Europe to a single entity.
The jury revealed a deep desire among artists to share their work with new audiences and explore cultural spaces beyond traditional borders. Although artistic destinations primarily focus on Western European countries, many projects have expanded to regions outside major capitals, reflecting a desire to strengthen the decentralisation of cultural networks and open up new horizons for communication with audiences.
The jury also emphasized the importance of artists continuing to explore new avenues for building artistic and intellectual relationships that expand their horizons in Europe. Artists in Europe have recently faced a number of challenges that have forced some of them into professional isolation, making it essential to provide them with genuine opportunities for networking. This opens the door for them to create critical and innovative artistic influences, potentially contributing to the enrichment of the European cultural landscape.
The committee calls for considering cooperation with host entities, whether institutions or cultural spaces, based on long-term relationships that go beyond financial support, but also include sustainable cultural and intellectual exchange that opens doors to dialogue and interaction. The committee encourages expanding artistic mobility to include non-central regions of Europe, enhancing opportunities for exploration and interaction with diverse audiences and expanding networking opportunities for artists and creatives in new cultural environments.
For more information about the ZAD programme, click here. To read the frequently asked questions and view the application form, click here. You can also join the open Q&A session, which will be held on September 25, 2025 at 3 pm CET by clicking here. During the session, we will answer your questions about the nature of support and application process of the programme.
This edition of ZAD: Miles for Connection is launched with the support of the Allianz Foundation
