THE FUNDAMENTALS | Writing Your Artist Statement | Mays Albaik seminar | Goethe Institut X GPP

Graciously supported and funded by Goethe Institut, GPP launched The Fundamentals, a free online educational program that aims to support the growth and development of budding artists in the MENASA region through a series of seminars and workshops led by renowned artists and cultural practitioners.

Your artist statement plays a crucial role in increasing your work’s exposure, sales potential and will position you for success when applying for residencies and grants.

This seminar looks at the role of text in visual art. Beginning with an overview of different ways textual matter infiltrates images, the seminar focused on work descriptions and didactic statements, unpacking a variety of artist statements to understand how they perform. The seminar ends with a short optional writing workshop, where participants will be led through writing a brief description of a specific work. The workshop looks at statements and descriptions written in English, non-native English speakers are welcome and encouraged to join.

About the Speaker:

Mays Albaik’s interdisciplinary visual practice has literary writing at its heart. Crystalizing as performance, video, and spatial installations, her work seeks to assert a connection to a location through the study of literary flora, of poetic production that is as tied to land as rooted plants. She holds a MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a B.Arch from the American University of Sharjah. An alumna of Salama Emerging Artist Fellowship (SEAF), she has participated in exhibitions including ‘Qala 0.8900’ (Darat Al Funun, Jordan); ‘BWWB’ (Helix Art Gallery, Brooklyn, New York); ‘Sawt 2a’ (Grey Noise, Dubai); ‘Mind the Gap’ (Tashkeel, Dubai), and ‘Change Coordinates + Someone Else’ (1971 Design Space, Sharjah). Mays’ practice developed out of the oral telling of her family’s history, the story of her grandfather’s exile from Palestine, and the winding path through geopolitical and cultural landscapes that led to where she is now; a non-citizen resident of her country of birth.