Artists

Aya Chriki

Aya Chriki (1995, Gabès, Tunisia) is a visual artist and PhD candidate in Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Rennes 2, France. Working across photography, video, writing, and research, she explores exile, gender, displacement, and identity. She was awarded the Photography Prize at Gabès Cinéma Fen (2022), recognized in ICTJ’s Outre-mer writing competition (2024), and selected for the Mediterranean project Tae’thir (2025). She became a finalist for the Arab Artists Now program and conducted a three-month photographic residency with the Halaqat program in Egypt, focusing on gender, photography, and the city. Chriki has participated in numerous group exhibitions across Tunisia, France, Lebanon, Egypt, and the UAE.

Aya Chriki

Artists in Residency: 1st Cohort of 2026

From February 16th to March 9th 2026, Tilal AiR welcomes nine artists from diverse backgrounds, brought together for its February cohort. Selected through the open call launched in November 2025, their projects were reviewed by an international jury composed of Abdramane Kamate, Divya Bhatia, and Rasha Salah. 

Over three weeks, the residency becomes a living laboratory. The artists develop their research in a setting conducive to experimentation and dialogue, alternating between individual work periods, collective gatherings, and exchanges with the local context. This rhythm fosters the deepening of personal approaches while opening spaces for shared reflection. 

Through the diversity of practices — visual arts, writing, performance, and transdisciplinary research — this new cohort embodies the spirit of Tilal AiR: to create rigorous yet caring working conditions where situated narratives, contemporary imaginaries, and relationships with the living intersect and mutually enrich one another. 

Through this program, Tilal AiR reaffirms its commitment to emerging artistic processes and to the international circulation of knowledge, by supporting modes of transmission, collaboration, and local anchoring that extend beyond the timeframe of the residency. 

Artists in Residency: 1st Cohort of 2026