Shurooq Amin

I've been a traditional artist for a long time. I had my first solo exhibition probably at the age of 23 or something. Over the years, my work started to become more socio-political due to personal issues I was going through, and, based on the treatment I was getting in society, I decided to put my frustration on canvas. I created these artworks which basically exposed the hypocrisy of the Kuwaiti man. It was just a statement based on my personal experience. And within three hours that exhibition It’s a Man’s World was shut down by the Secret Service, the Ministry of Information, and the police. From then on, my work was picked up by a gallery in Dubai but not before being interrogated, ostracized, bullied, and harassed for six months. My kids have obviously been affected as well. I finally decided that I was going to counter with a collection that shows the futility of censorship. For example, what they did to me was completely useless because history shows us that everything whether it's a movie or a book or anything that has been censored throughout history was one day uncensored. And not only that, but you shed more light on it. What you want to silence, in the end it gives it more power. So, I did an exhibition based on all this and it was very successful: Popcornographic. I've taken a lot of titles from these books and movies that have been banned, like To Kill a Mockingbird, which I twisted into To Kill a Mocking Girl, and instead of The Grapes of wrath, I twisted it to The Dates of Wrath. I like playing games and twisting words because that's my passion. By the way, my PhD is in a field called Ekphrasis, which is kind of a marriage of poetry and art, or text and image. So, all my work connected to the text that is associated with it. For the eight years between 2012 and 2020, I was exhibiting abroad. I became the first Kuwaiti female artist to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, which was a huge dream of mine. I also got auctioned at Christie's twice, which is a huge accomplishment in any artist's lifetime. So a lot of great things did happen from a very bad thing. In January 2020, I did a show again in Kuwait. The gallery owner and I thought that Kuwait had progressed and the art movement had moved on and things were better. Unfortunately, it wasn't, this exhibition was called “Like Russian Dolls We Nest in Previous Selves”. And it was not an expose of the Arabian man but of society in general. It was about societies being like a Russian doll and about history repeating itself. How we carry the blood of our ancestors that might have been rapists and murderers in our veins. Their blood is in our blood, you know what I mean? So that was shut down yet again, and for the next month before the airport closed in Kuwait for Covid, all the newspapers and TV channels were talking negatively about me and trying to humiliate me. It only got traction locally this time though, that first time was quite international. And I had this famous painting, the King of Hearts with the Arabic man kissing the Arabic woman. Everyone now recognizes it even if they don’t know who I am, it’s become iconic. Then a month later, I was literally saved by the pandemic, or as they say, saved by the bell. The local media forgot about me and focused on this global issue now. And that was the time I discovered NFTs. I started reading about them and researching and only started minting early 2021. I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning, as we all did, but I slowly started to get my footing and found that there's a huge gap in the market for the Middle Eastern region. So MENA NFT talks as a Twitter Space was established with the aim of connecting people from the region to each other. Hopefully we can come up with ideas that are not copied from the west. Dubai might be an exception where NFTs are welcome and booming but other parts of the region don’t support it as much, so the creatives end up leaving. In the last two years I’ve just been focusing on the NFT space. I haven’t left traditional art though, but I’m loving the freedom of taking my studio with me wherever I go and producing digital art. I’m painting on the plane, in the lounge, hotel room and anywhere I am whenever I have a few minutes. Whereas when I’m painting a physical acrylic painting, I’m stuck to four walls. I was also thirsty to meet the web3 folk in Kuwait. There were very few artists at the time. So, I decided to take it upon myself to introduce NFTs to the country, and a small seed of a humble NFT exhibition blew up into a two-month event after I received submissions from over 100 artists. We called it WAGMI and it became a massive Biennale. It was an exhibition to educate, and consume fine art, AI, and animations as NFTs. We showed the region that it’s not just about blue chips and apes. We had talks from people coming from Beirut, London, and Dubai, and the audience was really interested to hear about the tech and the art. We brought access to people that previously didn’t have access to this knowledge. A lot of artists wanted to include physical art at WAGMI, but I said, “not this time” because then the audience might say, “We told you that you can’t have a purely Web3 exhibition without printing something physical.” And I really wanted to make a point. And it worked. So now, I find myself on the precipice of this renaissance and I’m excited to see what happens next. And I really think it’s about the fine art market adopting NFTs. It’s already happening in pockets of the market like Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Education is also important for the average art buyer to disconnect their perception of the price of cryptocurrencies to the legitimacy of digital art. This tech isn’t going anywhere, and art is forever.