Artists

Asanda Ruda

Choreographer, performance artist, and teacher Asanda Ruda has built an international reputation through a powerful and visionary dance practice. Between 2015 and 2023, she performed globally, including in works by Pina Bausch. Her solo work gained recognition in 2021 with the l’Acogny D’Argent Award, leading to residencies in Zurich, Brussels, and HELLERAU Theatre in Dresden. In 2025, she received the Choreographers Research Residency Award at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her acclaimed piece KEMET Black Lands explores space, politics, and cultural emancipation through an Afro-contemporary lens, asserting identity and individuality while engaging with heritage, spirituality, and transformation.

Asanda Ruda

Artists in Residency: 2nd Cohort of 2026

From February 16th to March 9th 2026, Tilal AiR welcomes nine artists from diverse backgrounds, brought together for its February cohort. Selected through the open call launched in November 2025, their projects were reviewed by an international jury composed of Abdramane Kamate, Divya Bhatia, and Rasha Salah. 

Over three weeks, the residency becomes a living laboratory. The artists develop their research in a setting conducive to experimentation and dialogue, alternating between individual work periods, collective gatherings, and exchanges with the local context. This rhythm fosters the deepening of personal approaches while opening spaces for shared reflection. 

Through the diversity of practices — visual arts, writing, performance, and transdisciplinary research — this new cohort embodies the spirit of Tilal AiR: to create rigorous yet caring working conditions where situated narratives, contemporary imaginaries, and relationships with the living intersect and mutually enrich one another. 

Through this program, Tilal AiR reaffirms its commitment to emerging artistic processes and to the international circulation of knowledge, by supporting modes of transmission, collaboration, and local anchoring that extend beyond the timeframe of the residency. 

Artists in Residency: 2nd Cohort of 2026