NOOR, together with Organ Vida International Photography Festival and the National Gallery of Armenia, launched CROSS-LOOKING: East–West Artistic Residencies—a European programme exploring image circulation between East and West, intercultural narratives, and the evolving boundaries of visual storytelling and documentary practices.
We are pleased to announce the artists selected by NOOR through an open call that received over 330 applications for this collaborative residency programme. Learn more about the open call here.
Yerevan Resident: Najla Said (Egypt/Germany) - Instagram: @najlasaid_
Istanbul Resident: Rebecca Topakian (Armenia/France) - Instagram: @rebitobi
Cairo Resident: Emilia Martin (Poland/Netherlands) - Instagram: @itsemimartin
Rome Resident: Raisan Hameed (Iraq/Germany) - Instagram: @raisan_hameed
Congratulations to all the participants selected. Follow the Cross-Looking project on Instagram for updates, and stay tuned as other organisations will announce their selections soon.
Residents of NOOR
Najla Said
Born in 1999 in Cairo, she is an Egyptian visual artist working with photography, text, video, and food. She pursued her studies across Cairo, Paris, and Boston, and holds a bachelor’s degree in communication design from Berlin.
Her interdisciplinary practice explores themes of identity, femininity, urban transformation, and the interplay between personal and collective memory. Often drawing from her own experiences, she uses intimate, sensory narratives to reflect on the spaces we inhabit and the stories we inherit.
Her project, selected for the Yerevan residency (16–27 September 2025), explores culinary traditions as vessels of memory. Inspired by her father’s rare moments of cooking—particularly the Armenian-rooted dish Basterma and eggs—she documents domestic food rituals through photography and interviews. Focusing on family gatherings, inherited recipes, and ecological knowledge, the project examines how food preserves cultural narratives. Using experimental analogue techniques that incorporate organic and chemical processes, the work reflects on heritage, displacement, and the politics of remembering through food as both subject and material.
Rebecca Topakian
Born in 1989 in France, Rebecca is a French-Armenian artist living and working between Paris and Yerevan. After studying philosophy and geography, she turned to photography and graduated from ENSP Arles in 2015.
Her practice explores identity through its invisible, mythological, and fictional dimensions. Moving between documentary and poetic approaches, she investigates the intersections of reality and fiction, the personal and the political, focusing on personal and collective identities.
Photo: © Hassan Ghonim
Rebecca’s project, Il faut que les braises..., selected for the Istanbul residency (17–28 November 2025), brings together artists with a shared interest in the region’s memories and identities, combining photographic production with archival research. Having visited Istanbul several times to investigate and document the footsteps of her grandfather, an Armenian from Ottoman Turkey, she continues to develop her project at the intersection of documentary and fiction, focusing on Armenians in Turkey and the consequences of genocide denial on the populations living there today.
Emilia Martin
Born in 1991 in Poland and based in The Hague, Emilia graduated from the MA Photography & Society programme at the Royal Academy of Art (2022). Her practice explores how stories, myths, and rituals shape collective and societal structures.
Drawing from her ancestral heritage and informed by intersectional feminist discourse, she challenges binary ideas of fiction and truth and how these are visually constructed.
Emilia’s project, chosen for the Cairo residency (17–28 January 2026), Hail Mary, Bobbin Lace, Serpent's Thread is a tribute to the overlooked labour of women. Inspired by her grandmother—a countryside textile worker whose craft moved between the everyday and the sacred—the project interlaces personal memory, mythology, and feminist textile history. It honours generations of women who used thread to build and express their worlds, preserving stories often dismissed and at risk of being forgotten.
Raisan Hameed
Born in Mosul, he is an Iraqi-German artist based in Leipzig. He studied photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, completing his diploma and Meisterschüler under Prof. Tina Bara.
His multimedia work draws on personal memories, loss, and displacement, exploring how destruction and transformation shape identity. Inspired by archival traces and elemental processes, he creates poetic reflections on memory and transience.
Raisan’s project, chosen for the Rome residency (16–27 March 2026), Between Dissolution and Memory, investigates the interaction between water and photographic memory. Drawing on the Tigris River as both a personal and symbolic reference, the project explores how water can obscure, reveal, and transform visual narratives. Through experimental photographic techniques using analogue and chemical processes, the work engages with erosion, disappearance, and preservation—echoing the fragile layers of memory shaped by political rupture and migration.
CROSS-LOOKING: East-West Artistic Residencies is a collaboration between NOOR, Organ Vida International Photography Festival, the National Gallery of Armenia, Université Paris Cité, Unione della Romagna Faentina and Università Iuav di Venezia. The project is co-funded by Creative Europe under project 101174138 — CROSS-LOOKING.
"Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them."
Header Image Credit: © Emillia Martin, the both of us, 2024.