About Ali Eslami

Ali Eslami (b.1991) is an Iranian-Dutch artist based in Amsterdam. His work deals with long-term, practice-based research that builds and grows through speculative thinking and world-building. His work engages and plays with temporal and spatial investigations of memory, computation, human cognition, and emotions, often informed by non-Western philosophical frameworks, such as Suhrawardi's Illuminationism. This line of inquiry results in forms of poetic engineering that seek the potential lying between the real and the unreal. His engineering background and passion for video games nurtured an obsession with cybernetics and computation and continue to build his curiosity towards the shifting roles of form and function that create virtual worlds. He works across various mediums, including Film, Interactive Simulation, VR, writing, installation, and performance lectures. Eslami is an alumnus of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2021–23). His work has received awards including the IDFA DocLab Award for Best Immersive Non-fiction (2016), the Golden Calf for Best Interactive (2020, with Mamali Shafahi), the Cremer Prize from LWL-Museum Münster (2023) and Wendy-Gutman Prize (2025). The focus of the residency will be my current project ESHRAQ, alongside some earlier works. More at eshraq.io and alllesss.com. Instagram: @alless0 Photo by Ruud Hermans