At this fourth edition, a total of 17 projects were received from different countries in the Middle East and North Africa region, as well as from Europe and the Americas. The purpose of NUR نور (Light) is to increase visibility and awareness of a project that gives a look at one or several aspects of Arab societies. In its 2025 edition, in alignment with PhotoEspaña, the call for entries invited applicants to focus on the notion “After All,” with a critical approach regarding the dynamics of post-conflict, post-colonialism, post-nature, transhumanism and post-photography.

Selected project
The project selected to become an exhibition at Casa Árabe within the framework of the PHotoESPAÑA 2025 Festival, the topic of which is “After All,” was Lo que queda entremedias / What lies in between, curated by Ana Belén García Mula, presenting the work of Tanya Traboulsi, Tamara Kalo and Taysir Batniji.

In a region marked by historical conflict and instability, these three artists with different backgrounds and approaches, who are however united by a shared past, take us on a journey to get a poetic, direct, unadorned glimpse of the reality in a fragment of the Arab world undergoing a profound process of change.

These experiences in a harsh environment are guided by their personal and professional paths and get redefined through their ability to portray and process by creating images in a way that is both transformative and therapeutic.

Resilience, forced displacement and transformation are the main focal points which shed light on the scars from history and the challenges of the present.

Special mentions
The jury would also like to mention that it viewed with especially great interest the project titled La infancia bajo objetivo by Diego Ibarra Sánchez, curated by Gertrud Gómez, a photographic project in which the author straddles amid the frontiers of photojournalism and art to spur thought on what remains when education is taken away. Ibarra and Gómez’s project focuses on children in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Similarly, a proposal positively rated based on its artistic proposal was Indicios en la arena by Argentine artist Andrea Alkalay and curated by Ruth Geoffroy, a project that proposes a space for reflection on the traces, both material and immaterial, which shape identities in perpetual becoming, positively rated based on the artistic proposal which it contained, as well. Through photographs produced using mixed techniques, both digital and analogical, the exhibition closely examines processes of resilience, reconnection and overlapping in space and time, providing evidence for the human capacity for transformation.

The idea behind this exhibition is to show the reality beyond the headlines, breaking down the barriers of our understanding of post-conflict realities, which aims to offer, not definitive answers, but instead closer approximations able to be combined with the concepts of memory, identity, displacement and transformation.

Read the jury’s decision here