Mays Albaik

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 fauna, 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); ‘Glass Triennial’ (Woods Gerry Gallery, USA); ‘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 origins, 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.

During the Critical Practice Programme, Mays plans to dive into the somatic aspects of language; the complex relationships between speech as a byproduct of abstract thought and its physical manifestations as sound and as written language.