Mays Albaik, A Terranean Love Note

Image courtesy of the Artist and Tashkeel

Visual artist Mays Albaik’s first solo exhibition, A Terranean Love Note, is a series of interdisciplinary works that investigate the multifaceted relationship between language, the body, and geography. The first artist from the 2020 cohort of Tashkeel’s Critical Practice Programme (CPP), she spent a year researching and designing spatial interventions, sculptures, and video pieces that shed light on how a sense of placehood—constructed sites of physical residence, digital spaces, or ancestral homelands—is formed, reflected, and refracted by one’s body, language and their various intersections. As part of CPP, Albaik was mentored by artist and curator Ala Younes and audiovisual artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

“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.”

Through her work she unpacks the possibility of fully existing in more than one place. It looks at language simultaneously as a vehicle and a reflection of these multiplicities, and at the digital world as proof of our ability to be multi-present. Pieces of the research crystalize in video sculptures, offering glimpses into the process and layers of the continuing project.

Teleprompter, A Terranean Love Note, Video Essay (2020), Aluminum sculpture.