“I think this time has been a period of transition and making the best out of the current situation on a personal and collective level. It has given me the chance to self-reflect, connect and dig deeper.

Tashkeel Studio has always been supportive and I am currently the artist in residence in the garden studio. I’m also working on reaching out to artists and art consultants in finding solutions for artists to sustain themselves and protect their rights. It has been a rich research to highlight artists concerns in supporting their career.

Despite the quarantine, I am still enrolled with my art residency with Seti Institute where I was supposed to be in San Fransisco at the Montalvo Arts Center and now we are looking at ways to do it remotely.”

“Since my studio is far from my home, ‏this made me move away from my tools and space, but I did not give up during the period of quarantine. I made a simple studio in corner of my house, and kept my hobby. I believe that the artist has the ability to cope with any circumstance. The best thing about this isolation is that I have read many books that I did not have time for before.”

‘We are defined by the things we are not’.

“In normal times, absorbing images, narratives and dynamics from the outside world, plays a big role in my artistic practice. But lately, between confinement and lockdown, I have found myself shifting my attention and energy towards my immediate direct surroundings.

The new body of work has been articulated towards an inner, more intimate and personal language.

During these past months, the form and texture of time-in-space has changed for us all, so I took a closer look at visuals from the mundane, our everyday’s vocabulary and used them as materials for new works.

The emojis, logos, slogans, newsflashes…, are the visual subjects of our present time.

Normally I don't transform the visuals themselves, I use them as they are. I assemble, juxtapose, and weave them together without changing their essence. But by assembling them into a tight condensed pattern, they lose their figural individual representation and leap into an abstract ornamental aesthetic.

These works are treated as woven textiles, as patchworks of details that unfold a conversation between visibility and invisibility and enquire into the complexities of individual and collective language, the symbolic and the abstract.”

“As artists we are warriors. It is our duty to question everything; it is our duty to invent the universe every morning keeping it close enough to a dream to be magic and near enough to reality to be comprehended. It is our duty to give the meaningless meaning and vice versa; we must face adversity all the time and are betting against all odds. As magicians dancing through life amongst the erupting volcanoes we do not run from the molten lava but burn our souls while capturing it in order to depict the colors of its fumes.

I would say that it has taken me a long time to process my thoughts about everything that is going on at the moment, but that would be a lie. The truth is I am still digesting this difficult meal. The recent evolution of events has completely altered the foundation of “instructed life”, we are seeing the core of our house of civilization melt while the dream of reality is torn from the nightmare of its shortcomings. We need, both as individuals and as a collective, to take more time to think about what is actually occurring, we need to go within ourselves and understand who and what we are as a species. Fast decisions and quick reactions are leading us into more confusion and disaster, exposing the nature of duality at its most lethal degree. In most every discipline doing things in a fast and uncontemplated manner just make it more difficult to perfect it down the line and this is what is happening with our communal lives. We are now beginning to experience a tidal wave of violence, despair, profit, control and hate from the swell of rapid action. Meditating is always a solution, it gives you the opportunity to know yourself and understand who and what you are, to rise above the trivial constrictions of existence and be in touch with the eternal flame of life. Deep down the tunnels, in the cave of self-knowledge is the exit that leads to unified life. We are not separate from one another, if one human suffers all humans suffer. “