Tewa Barnosa (1998) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker based between Tripoli and Amsterdam. Her practice spans installation, painting, and time-based media, including film essays, sound works, and performance. Her work carries an inquiry and speculation around spatial and infrastructural violence, Fascist technology, inherited memories and transmissions from lands, people and species that outlasts the aftermath of genocidal and ecological continuum. her process unfolds along two interconnected trajectories: a sonic evocation and oral tradition of collective vocality, rhythms and anti-colonial poetry rooted in Amazigh and Bedouin knowledge systems, electro-acoustic compositions and field recordings. and a trajectory of visual and image based research into politics of the archive, questioning the roles of imagery, iconography, video games and cinema in constructing or manipulating past and ongoing political imaginaries.
Her pedagogical and socially engaged practice emerged through establishing collective infrastructures in post-revolution Libya. Between 2015 and 2023, she initiated and directed WaraQ, an art space and laboratory based in Tripoli. During this period, she curated and led several projects situated within the knowledge and lived realities of the Libyan civil war, including Totalitarian Props (2023), an exhibition on the socio-political implications of Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism movements; Shifting Sands (2021), a mentorship program and exhibition bringing together artists, activists, and academics across Libya around methods of archiving; Kashkoul of Collective Resistance (2020), a collaborative publication reflecting on life under bombardment during the pandemic; and ArtOut (2018), a series of artistic gatherings in the public spaces of Tripoli's Old City.
Barnosa is an alumni of the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague 2024-2025. A resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten 2021-2023, a recipient of S+T+Arts and Arts Electronica African distinction awards 2025, the Iwaelwahaus African Artist Award 2021, and the Berlin-based fellowship for artists at risk by the Martin Roth initiative 2019-2020.
Her pedagogical and socially engaged practice emerged through establishing collective infrastructures in post-revolution Libya. Between 2015 and 2023, she initiated and directed WaraQ, an art space and laboratory based in Tripoli. During this period, she curated and led several projects situated within the knowledge and lived realities of the Libyan civil war, including Totalitarian Props (2023), an exhibition on the socio-political implications of Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism movements; Shifting Sands (2021), a mentorship program and exhibition bringing together artists, activists, and academics across Libya around methods of archiving; Kashkoul of Collective Resistance (2020), a collaborative publication reflecting on life under bombardment during the pandemic; and ArtOut (2018), a series of artistic gatherings in the public spaces of Tripoli's Old City.
Barnosa is an alumni of the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague 2024-2025. A resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten 2021-2023, a recipient of S+T+Arts and Arts Electronica African distinction awards 2025, the Iwaelwahaus African Artist Award 2021, and the Berlin-based fellowship for artists at risk by the Martin Roth initiative 2019-2020.