“There is a multiplicity of placehood in our lives; of the place where we are now, of the place where our loved ones are, and of the place where we grew up. We also exercise this multiplicity by always being connected to the digital sphere. No longer a portal, our screens have become places themselves – no longer mediators or transitional. They are designations.”

Tashkeel is proud to present ‘A Terranean Love Note’, a solo exhibition by the artist Mays Albaik. The exhibition is a culmination of Albaik’s year-long research and development on the Critical Practice Programme 2020 at Tashkeel with mentors Ala Younes and Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

Through spatial interventions, sculpture and video work, ‘A Terranean Love Note’ explores moments of contact between the self and placehood – constructed sites of physical residence, digital spaces or ancestral homelands. The works triangulate body, language and space by layering a personal poetics onto the social politics that define our relationship to geography.

Mays Albaik’s early practice developed out of the oral narration 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. She holds an 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); ‘Before We Were Banned’ (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).

Book through emailing [email protected] to visit.

Programming
Artist-led tours

12 January 2021 (opening day tour) | 5-6 pm, 6- 7 pm, 7-8 pm
16 January 2021 | 1-2 pm, 2-3 pm, 3-4 pm
27 February 2021 | 1-2 pm, 2-3 pm, 3-4 pm

Book through emailing [email protected]

Join the Artist on a tour of the exhibited work, learn about the process, research, and collaborations that generated the question at the heart of this exhibition: How do we think through the multiplicity of our relationship to places, despite the singularity of our bodies?

Nadine Khalil in Conversation with Mays Albaik

Listen in as Nadine Khalil and Mays Albaik discuss some of the driving questions behind this new body of work: The body and the internet as place, and the make-up of a linguistic and bureaucratic apparatus of presence.

‘A Terranean Love Note: Release of Artist Book
10 February 2021

The Book is a small anthology of ideas and conversations that discuss speech and language, the body and the digital, and our constructs of placehood and belonging. The book includes contributions by the programme’s mentors Ala Younes and Lawrence Abuhamdan, Moad Musbahi, Nadine Khalil, and an interview with Deepak Unnikrishnan.

‘Casting: Surrogates’ Workshop
20 February 2021 | 10 am - 1 pm

Explore body-casting techniques with the artist, thinking conceptually through the shift between positive and negative, absence and presence, and the mediation of touch and the haptic interface of the skin.