We are very pleased to present the winners of the Villa Romana 2022 award, just arrived in Florence, for a first exhibition. Haure Madjid, Jasmina Metwaly, Neda Saeedi and Alexander Skorobogatov have been nominated by Antonia Alampi, curator and director of the Spore Initiative in Berlin and by the artist Hiwa K. The collaboration between the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max Planck Institut has now reached its third year: Neda Saeedi was invited by both institutes as International Research Fellow. The four artists will live and work in Villa Romana until the end of November.

Haure Madjid , born in 1975 in Sulaimanya in Kurdistan, studied in his hometown and at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, where he currently lives. In his painting, he decontextualizes Arabic ornamentation and Western figuration and explores the question of how images of different cultures take shape.

Jasmina Metwaly , born in Warsaw in 1982, now resides in Berlin. He studied at Central Saint Martins College in London and lived in Cairo for a long time, until he left the city following the failure of the so-called Arab Spring. In Cairo she co-founded the Mosireen collective and the media archive 858.ma, in recent years she has dedicated herself to the voice of people and their unheard stories, returning them in audio and video works.

Neda Saeedi , born in Tehran in 1987, studied at the Berlin University of the Arts with Hito Steyerl. Through elaborate research and precise materialization, he investigates how power structures are reflected, for example, in garden design, or how modernization projects under Shah Pahlavi, in the 1970s, sought to alienate nomadic cultures and to impose monocultures.

Alexander Skorobogatov , born in 1983 in Madyn, Russia, has lived in Germany since the 1990s, and studied at the Kunsthochschule Mainz, the University of the Arts in Berlin and Central Saint Martins College in London. In his drawings, paintings and sculptures, he plays with seemingly naive motifs, explosive colors and extraordinarily bizarre arrangements.