Athens Residency Fall 2026
Residency Begins: Thursday, September 10 – Monday, November 30, 2026
Meet the Fellows of the Fall 2026 Athens Residency
Rory Tsapayi is an independent curator based between Cape Town, Harare, and Dublin, focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century southern African ecosocial histories. Rory is the Assistant to the Curator of the 61st Biennale Arte di Venezia: In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh (2026) and the co-curator (with Raul Jorge Gourgel) of the SADC* Biennale (2025, 2027), a seriously satirical investigation of the national pavilion form and its unraveling in a southern African context. Tsapayi is currently completing an MA in Visual History at the University of the Western Cape and serving on the Selection Committee for the Future Generation Art Prize (Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, 2026). Rory was formerly a Curatorial Researcher at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. His work poetically entangles the elemental, the political, the aesthetic, and the affective in search of new ways of relating to our worlds.
His exhibitions include And I, a newly evolved fish (Iyatsiba Lab, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, 2025) Midas Touch – Khanyi Mawhayi (CHURCH Projects, Cape Town, 2023); Selections from the Collection and Spring is Rebellious: The Art and Life of Albie Sachs (Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, 2024, 2025) and forthcoming projects at The Dock Arts Centre (Leitrim, Ireland, 2027) and Ichihara Lakeside Museum (Chiba, Japan, 2028).
Bassem Yousri is an Egyptian artist and filmmaker based between Cairo and Berlin. His often humorous installations and films interrogate the mundane — its objects, surfaces, and gestures — and the forms of power they quietly carry. His practice also extends to translation, bringing writing on art from English into Arabic.
Yousri has held several solo exhibitions in the US and Egypt, and his work has been shown at Centre Pompidou and l’Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Sharjah Art Foundation; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; BOZAR, Brussels; Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin; and IVAM, Valencia. His work is held in the collection of the State Museum of Egyptian Art, Munich.
He holds an MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University (2009) and was a 2006 Fulbright Scholarship recipient. He has held several academic and non-academic teaching positions, including Associate Professor of Practice in Visual Arts at the American University in Cairo (2023–2025). His films move between documentary and fiction, among them The Wardrobe Man (2018), and he is currently completing Film Romancy, a feature that reassembles footage from a romantic-comedy workshop he was filming in Cairo when the 2011 revolution interrupted it.
