BIOGRAPHY
Monya Riachi is an interdisciplinary artist. Her practice is led by materials and contextual research, and interlaces politics, poetry and affect. Her works approach matter as a site of narrative, movement and transformation, and entangle the political geographies of her home and adopted countries Lebanon and Britain. She collaborates with musicians, craftspeople, writers, geologists, materials scientists and philosophers in the research and making of her work, often realised through sculpture, installation, writing and performance.
Monya holds an MFA from Glasgow School of Art. She was at the Sharjah Art Foundation Residency Programme (2026), and was awarded the Lewisham Arthouse Postgraduate Award (2024) and the Boghossian Foundation Visual Arts Prize (2024). Her work has been exhibited in the UK, Lebanon and Italy, with solo presentations across London and Glasgow. Previous residencies include Lewisham Arthouse (London, 2024), 3obour A River between Mountains (UK&Morocco), Cove Park (Scotland, 2023) and Ashkal Alwan (Lebanon, 2022).
The House Has a Body
14 October – 14 November 2026 · Gallery 44, London. The House Has a Body brings together Marisa Müsing, Hayfa Algwaiz and Monya Riachi, considering how domestic spaces hold emotion, memory and traces of lived experience.
For The House Has a Body, Riachi’s Poppy Series follows the evolving life of a poppy beyond its brief red bloom. Attending to the head, seeds and fallen petals, the work considers the poppy as a body that hosts time. Riachi thinks of the house similarly: a space that holds traces of the lives that pass through it and remains poised to receive new life.
We Speak Unseen, Tongues Winding was developed and produced with Zellige master artisan Ahmed Housni in Fez, Morocco. The sculpture reveals the normally concealed back of the tiles, drawing attention to unseen labour and the material time of clay. Its pattern originates in Riachi’s hand gestures, translated into digital symbols and cut into the tiles by Housni. Photography: Ari Murad. © Gallery 44. Exhibition text: Shirin Fathi.
