2024-03-03 16:41:07
- Anoud Al-Khoury: I am proud of my first participation
- Nawal Ahmed: My project is entitled “Between Languages”
- “Outside the Frame” is an idea inspired by heritage
Investigation: Maha Adel
The 12th edition of the SIKKA Arts and Design Festival, which was held in the Shindagha area in Dubai, embraced a rich diversity of youth designs and works, within a rich agenda of exhibitions and artistic creations, with the participation of more than 500 creators and artists from the Emirates, the region and the world. This reflects the festival’s keenness to strengthen the strength of the cultural and creative industries in the emirate, and its endeavor to create a sustainable environment capable of supporting artists and emerging talents, and enabling them to contribute to enriching the local artistic scene, embodying Dubai’s cultural vision aimed at consolidating the emirate’s position as a global center for culture and an incubator for creativity. And a forum for talents.
Anoud Al-Khoury, a student at the Higher Colleges of Technology majoring in applied media, says about her participation in the festival with the “Spices Journey” project: “I am proud of my first participation in the exhibition that is held annually in Dubai to encourage artists to highlight their creativity and introduce their energy to visitors from all over the world, and that is why I chose to embody My artistic project reflects an aspect of the country’s history by expressing the strong and extended relationship that links the Emirates with India, and the idea of the design is based on highlighting an aspect of the history and civilization of our beloved country and highlighting its position as a meeting point for many civilizations, and its distinction in commercial and cultural exchange between peoples.”
She continued: “The design showcases the most important materials that we import from India, such as fabrics with their colors, materials, and spices that Indian markets are famous for, and they are considered a cornerstone of our popular markets, and the method of displaying them was inspired by the shops of the old market in Dubai, where my project was divided into two parts; The first pavilion is dedicated to displaying Indian fabrics in their colors in the form of hanging curtains, in addition to displaying types of spices such as black pepper, anise, ginger, bay leaf, and others. The second section included a display of types of prints and drawings characteristic of the textile industry in India. I also used a famous Indian phrase and wrote it in Arabic letters to illustrate the exchange of cultures, which is “Kisahi Teki,” which we all know in the country and means “How are you? Fine.” I chose it to express greetings and peace between peoples.” .
She added: “I benefited a lot from my participation in SIKKA, as I got to know more artists, and I learned to cooperate and communicate better, and this is a resource that will benefit me in my career, especially when dealing with different art exhibitions, and my presence in SIKKA and at a heritage site in Shindagha gave me an incentive to think in a more creative way.”
The team working on the “Outside the Frame” project, consisting of three female students at Higher Technology in Dubai, Maitha Ahmed Al Muhairi, Ghaya Hamdan, and Shouq Al Hammadi, told Al Khaleej about the features of their artistic work: “The idea of our project is inspired by our Emirati heritage, and we used recycled materials and several arts that have been created.” Employing it, such as collage and embroidery with threads, our project is distinguished by being a contemporary work of art that mimics the Emirati Arab culture in a modern way. The Out of the Frame project is an innovative artistic combination that includes more than one design, and demonstrates the merging of the Emirati heritage with the modern urban reality in an innovative way by integrating the art of collage with the artistic paintings displayed in a way Three-dimensional and tangible, we also cooperated with the Kiljurd project in the Emirates and were able to implement a handmade unit that caught the attention of attendees of all nationalities at the festival.”
They continue: “The project consists of 4 pieces of art, which is a three-dimensional painting that reflects the culture of falconry among our ancestors and throughout the ages. In it, we used a mixture of falcon and bustard feathers to express the hunter and the prey together, and in addition to a painting of an Emirati family, a husband and wife in front of a mirror, and in this painting we feel… The viewer is a part of the painting, as if the characters inside it are interacting with the viewer, and through it we tried to highlight the importance of visiting art exhibitions in our lives as future artists, and we invite people to be a part of this experience. There is a painting made of palm fronds, tulle, an upholstered shawl, and accessories that express gold, and the painting expresses Our mothers and how they loved to wear jewelery and turbans on holidays, in addition to a model representing the Emirati Council, which includes an old telephone, old and vintage perfumes, pottery, a mat, food trays, and paintings that express Dubai, such as a piece entitled “We meet in Dubai,” which is a carpet on which we wrote in writing. We combined the Arabic and English languages into the phrase “Let’s meet in Dubai,” so that we can symbolize the exchange of cultures and the coexistence of nationalities in our beloved country.
Nawal Ahmed, a graphic design student at the Higher College of Technology in Dubai, shares with us the ideas of her artistic project that raised questions from the audience at the festival, especially from foreign nationalities who found the letters of their current or vanished language represented in the “Between Languages” project that she is presenting at the festival. She says: “My project The idea for the artwork, titled “Between Languages,” came to me from a question that frequently comes to my mind, which is why we don’t all speak one language in the world. I conducted research on that, and discovered that among the languages of the world there are many common components, and that they contain 3 basics, which are the presence of letters, words, and sentences. What motivated me to combine human society and languages is because they both seem different, but they have similarities in content. The human being consists of the body, the spirit, and the soul. I chose to highlight this in an artistic work that explains to the world the concept of language, and I designed a project that expresses the letters of international languages and the extent of similarity and difference. Each piece has a color, to symbolize the difference that exists between people, and I deliberately made the letters one color in order to show the importance of language and its similarity in communication between people, while using mirrors that symbolize the concept of language, because it is the light with which we see the world and the mirrors that reflect our feelings and thoughts.”
She adds: “I used cloth and mirrors in the artwork, and printing on the cloth and barcode leads to a video that expresses the sound of the letter in more than one language around the world, such as French, English, Arabic, and Hindi. I used approximately 70 languages, such as Japanese, Hebrew, Hindi, Arabic, English, and Korean. There are currently About 7,000 languages, 2,000 of which have disappeared, and this saddens me that there are languages that have disappeared and no longer exist.”
She continued: “The research took about 3 months, then the implementation took about two months. I also found exciting results such as the presence of the letter M, for example, in 96% of all the world’s languages. Therefore, I made it present at the forefront of the work, and the least sound present in the world’s languages is the letter F, and its representation is 44%.” I enjoyed implementing this design a lot, because during the research trip I communicated with professors from Britain, Morocco, and the University of Sharjah, all of them in the specializations of language and sounds, and I benefited greatly from my participation in the Sikka Festival, which gave me the opportunity to present my ideas and communicate them to all cultures of the world.”
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