About the Artists

Visual Artist

Salwa Aleryani, born in Sana'a, Yemen, is a visual artist working primarily with sculpture and installation. Through constellations of made and found objects, her work engages with places and infrastructures as well as their historical backgrounds, potentials, and promises. In recent years, she has exhibited at Kunstverein Freiburg, Skulpturenpark Berlin, MMAG Amman, and Savvy Contemporary Berlin, among others. She lives and works in Berlin.



Salwa Aleryani's project follows in the footsteps of artist Pacita Abad, a Filipina and self-defined woman of color who created work across many countries, often incorporating different crafts and cultures to reflect on societal issues. In 1988, Abad spent several weeks in Yemen, where she traveled extensively. Fascinated by the vernacular architecture, she dedicated a large body of work to her journey. In Los Angeles, Salwa plans to collaborate with the Pacita Abad Art Estate to learn more about this work and her time in Yemen.

                                                Salwa Aleryani is Villa Aurora Fellow of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and                                                           Europe.

Visual Artist

Viktoria Binschtok, born in Moscow, Russia, and raised in Germany, studied Photography and Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. She lives in Berlin. In her photographic works, Viktoria Binschtok deals with circulating images of our globalized world.

At Villa Aurora, Viktoria Binschtok wants to discover perspectives beyond the mediated reality in Los Angeles, a city known for its film and beauty industry.

Composer and Artist

Pan Daijing, born in Guiyang, China, is an artist and composer who primarily engages with performance, installation, sound, and moving images. Drawing on the capacity of music to exceed the limits of language and distort the passage of time, Daijing’s work seeks to communicate physical, psychological, and sonic depths and to invoke a collective experience of solitude. Often realized as architectural interventions, her work pressurizes the boundaries between forms and between the alive and inanimate to create enveloping sensory environments.

As a composer with a background in avant-garde and noise music, the practice of Pan Daijing has centered around pain, trauma, and our innermost desires and fears through vulnerable and honest compositional approaches. During her residency at Villa Aurora, she aims to continue her work with a particular focus on furthering her research into opera as an art form and a mode of performance, and on accessing extremes of sound, emotion, and voice.  

Filmmaker

Nathalie David, born in France, studied fine arts at the Villa Arson in Nice and the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, with subsequent additional studies at Pontus Hultén's Institut des Hautes Études in Paris and a fellowship at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Potsdam-Babelsberg. She sees the documentary perspective as a genre and a specific art process. Her work includes films, radio plays, photographs, and drawings. She lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin.

Nathalie David's project is a film about the poet, collector, architect, and patron of the arts Edward James, who lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1962 (from 1946 mostly as a visitor). There he was friends with, among others, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Ruth Ford, and Jack Larson, but he also socialized with Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Igor Stravinsky. In 1946 he moved to Mexico, where he spent 30 years building a unique ensemble of Surrealist architecture in collaboration with the indigenous population. The unrecognized grandson of Edward VII, he built the largest private collection of Surrealist art, beginning in 1933. Without his patronage, Surrealism would not have achieved the prominence it has today.

Novelist and Political Activist

Sharon Dodua Otoo is a novelist and political activist. Otoo won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 with the text Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin. Her first novel Adas Raum was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2021 and has been translated into several languages, including two English language versions Ada's Realm (MacLehose Press, 2023) and Ada's Room (Riverhead Books, 2023). In collaboration with the Ruhrfestspiele, one of the oldest, largest and most renowned theatre festivals in Europe, she curates the Black German-language literature festival "Resonanzen".