“Ephemeral Landscapes of the Sun” is the title of the group show curated by Analía Iglesias and Irene Díaz, winner of the 2024 edition of the NUR call for entries, organized by Casa Árabe and PhotoEspaña. The exhibition is structured around a group of artists from Africa and the Middle East born in the 1980s and 1990s: Roger Anis, M’hammed Kilito, Salih Basheer, Imane Djamil, Ebti Nabag, Yumna Al Arashi, Tanya Habjouqa, Abdallah Al Khatib and Leila Chaïbi.

The opening talk will provide an opportunity for two of them, Imane Djamil and Salih Basheer, to give us a closer look at their work and the stories which affect and inspire them. They are stories about the zeal for finding solutions to conflicts and hardships, but which include exoduses with a huge emotional impact. Salih Basheer is Sudanese and experienced the trauma of losing his parents when he was a child, having had to move to another city with his grandmother. He reflects upon this uprooting in the series 22 Days in Between (22 días entre medio). In another place, Morocco’s Imane Djamil, who narrates from Tarfaya, a small town where young people surf, the dreams of living a major life opportunity that never ends up arriving, reaching the other shore in Slow days in the fortunate Isle.

Salih Basheer (Omdurman, Sudan, 1995) earned his degree in Geography from Cairo University (Egypt) in 2017 and later studied photojournalism in Denmark. In 2021, he received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Student Scholarship for his personal project 22 Days in Between, included in the exhibition at Casa Arabe. Turned into a photobook, this work received the Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2023. In 2022, the British Journal of Photography featured Basheer as one of the 15 emerging photographers of the year. His work has been published in TIME magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and Al Jazeera.

Imane Djamil (Casablanca, Morocco, 1996) is a self-taught visual storyteller who lives and works in Morocco. Her work has been exhibited at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Casa Árabe in Madrid (PHE 2018), the Bamako Biennial, Mali and the Sharjah Biennial (UAE). In 2020, she co-founded the KOZ collective with photographers M’hammed Kilito, Yasmine Hatimi and Seif Kousmate. She designed Double Copies and 80 Miles from Atlantis, a project containing photos, texts and performances which she set in the Saharan town of Tarfaya, the site where Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s The Little Prince is said to have been conceived. In “Ephemeral Landscapes of the Sun,” he presents his unpublished series Slow days in the fortunate Isle (2021-2024).

Analía Iglesias (Córdoba, Argentina) has focused her work as a journalist and writer on gender issues, human rights, the environment, science and culture. She lived in Rabat for nearly four years and has been living in Spain for the last few years. She was an editor at La Voz del Interior and coordinated the blog Eros for El País newspaper for five years. She has also been a university lecturer, film planner and member of juries at film festivals in Europe and Africa. In addition to co-authoring two books, her experience in Rabat led her to write a book of chronicles and poetry titled Machi Mushkil: A closer look at destiny in the Maghreb.