Anna Seaman

I'm a writer. That's how I usually describe myself. I have spent most of my life writing other people's stories for newspapers and magazines. I'm good at getting into people's heads and translating others thoughts into words, and that's what drew me to art. In 2013, I was asked to cover visual arts for The National, which is something that I didn't want to do initially because I don't have an academic background in arts. But I went with it because even if I wasn’t formally educated, I love art, stories, visuals, and people. So, I found success because artists, by their very nature are not “wordy” people. They can often speak well, but they cannot usually put those thoughts into words. I almost cried when I interviewed my first artist on the job because I was so happy. I felt like this was what I had been looking for; something that I actually wanted to write about. Writing about art is an artform, it’s poetic. And I've been doing that ever since - going on 10 years now. After a while, I moved into curation because I realized that curating an exhibition is also poetic. It is largely about finding a narrative and those with complimentary artistic vocabularies. There wasn't much space in Dubai for independent young curators so I positioned myself as that and worked with emerging artists. I did a few shows in 2018 and 2019 and then the good old “C” shut everything down. And that’s when MORROW collective comes in. (@MorrowCollect) The NFT space exploded in parallel to Covid. I was introduced to NFTs by Jen and Dave, my colleagues, and friends, and they were saying, “You should write about NFTs, you should write about what's going on. You should add your art critique to the NFT space.” And I was like, “What is an NFT?” MORROW was born from a desire to bring the traditional art world into the crypto space – what we see as the future of art. Ultimately, to be a bridge between yesterday and tomorrow. “Morrow” is an old-fashioned word that people used to use for “tomorrow”. So, it was the perfect word for past and future. And our logo, I have to credit Claire for that: visually it's a mirror – past reflecting the future – and there a line crossing the “O’s” symbolizing the blockchain. Yeah… we love MORROW. When we launched, it was nine days before Art Dubai 2021, so we pulled together a deck and spoke to everyone at the event and ended up signing 12 galleries. We put out our first exhibition in May 2021 with 60 pieces from gallery artists and exhibited them in our metaverse space. However, nothing was as we thought it would be – we have been learning ever since. Art Dubai is an interesting milestone for us because, a year later, the fair announced the new digital section – a sign of the huge leap forward in the tokenized art space. However, whilst it is developing quickly much of our work has been educating our own market. The Web3 space is interesting to watch because in Web2, the big giants own our data, sell our data, and the user is basically the product. The algorithms know us better than we know ourselves. If I mentioned that I want to go on holiday to the Maldives an ad will pop up on my Instagram for a resort package. I feel like I’m in one of those sci-fi movies. So, Web3 came out of that. From the underground. From the need to move away from this centralization. I believe Web3 will turn everything on its head, as soon as people really understand its potential.