After welcoming the Iranian duo Tirdad Hashemi & Soufia Erfanian, the Pinault Collection has invited Saudi artist Anhar Salem as the next artist in residence to carry out a new project, beginning in October 2025.
Born in 1993 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Anhar Salem studied IT at the Arab Open University and then multimedia arts at Studio Le Fresnoy in France. A self-taught video and digital artist, she has developed a practice that explores, documents, and creates new public and private spaces characterised by themes that include daily life, the body, and social media. She uses music and her cell phone camera to improvise and engage in new forms of communication, ultimately redefining the limits of video as a medium.
The emergence of new communication styles between her characters points to a collective creation and a shared space that involves all the participants. Inspired by personal experiences and stories, she uses this collective space to explore the processes involved in the marginalisation of individuals and their images. Anhar Salem’s works reflect on those things that condition her relationship with her subjects, focusing on one fundamental issue: in what ways do we manage to enable a “representation of the self” in societies that exist at the margins of contemporary life, both in the real world and in virtual realms?
Located in a former rectory, the Pinault Collection’s artist's residency was inaugurated in December 2015. As a place to live and work, it provides time and space for artistic practice in a site that is well-suited for creating things. Residents are chosen by a selection committee that includes representatives from the Pinault Collection, the Grand Large FRAC Regional Contemporary Art Foundation, the Le Fresnoy School for Contemporary Art, the Louvre Lens, and the Lille Art Museum (LaM).
