Nidal El Khairy is an illustrator living in Amman, Jordan. After completing a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, he moved to Montreal, Canada where he spent four and half years working on political art in a context of local  grass-roots social movements such as the Coalition against the Deportation of Palestinian refugees, No One Is Illegal and Solidarity Across Boarders. He also had solo and group exhibitions in Montreal, Toronto, Tokyo, Beirut, Amman and Caracas

Kristine Khouri is a researcher, writer and photographer currently based in Beirut, Lebanon after spending a year in Amman (2007-2008) as a Fulbright fellow investigating visual art practice and production, specifically institutions and structures and identity production. She worked as a researcher for Walid Raad on his current project "Scratching on Things You Could Disavow: A History of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art," and with Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige on the the Haigazian Rocket Society project. With Rasha Salti, she cofounded "The History of Arab Modernities in the Visual Arts," a long term research project investigating the realm of production, exhibition, critical engagement and consumption of modern art in the region from the 1950s until the 1980s.

During their residency period at Makan, London based artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White continued to explore ways in which the philosophy underpinning open source software can be mapped onto creative production, looking at methods of free distribution and unlimited access, in contrast to many traditional models of art production: closed distribution and the limited edition.Whilst in residence at Makan, Eileen and Ben were researching Jordanian copyright and working with material that had fallen into the public domain. They worked with an out-of-copyright Jordanian film to create a new version for free distribution and are hoping to remix recordings of traditional Jordanian music to produce a new copyleft licensed CD (licensed Creative Commons, Jordan) in collaboration with musicians in Amman.
The residency is a cooperation between Makan and Gasworks, for more information:
www.gasworks.org.uk/international/
www.gasworks.org.uk

Bio

Eileen Simpson and Ben White often work outside the gallery, preferring to work in other public spaces: on-line, in clubs, magazines, shops and cinemas. Recently they established Open Music Archive http://www.openmusicarchive.org a collaborative initiative to source, digitise and distribute out of copyright sound recordings. Their recent projects include: Outlet, (Coleman’s Project Space, London) Nought-to-Sixty (ICA, London); Declose (Disclosures, Gasworks, London); Stop. Move (Loose Booty, London/Geneva/Zurich); Clips Blips and Loops (Who Makes And Owns Your Work, Stockholm); Free-to-air (Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK); Screen Tests (in collaboration with Marysia Lewandowska & Neil Cummings British Art Show 6), and Leverage (Futuresonic, Manchester)

Mohamed Salah came for a residency in Makan to work on his script approaching illegal immigrants travelling from North Africa to South Europe. He realised during his residency that Amman is different from his expectations, this young city is built around immigrants, and accordingly it became exciting in his eyes. He met characters of various backgrounds and nationalities, who maybe have different conditions that those of his protagonists, however similar in the fact that they too replace their countries of birth with others. He also found out that travelling between the Arab countries is valuable and reveals the differences between people and their heritage, and how little one people know about the other despite the assumption of knowledge.

Mohamed Salah screened his most recent film “Islands” in Makan during the residency