After a competitive selection process, we’re delighted to announce the three winning applications selected by our committee for the pilot program of Gypsum Bursaries. The bursary program will grant each awardee a sum of USD 1500 for the development of an artist’s book, and will pair each project with a mentor from our selection committee. The winning applicants are:

 Assem Hendawi, an artist and writer who works with video, computer-based media, and text to explore themes of the posthuman, futuristic imaginaries, and the way in which technology informs identity in late capitalism. 

Assem will work on a project that will document and narrativize the artist’s image-making process, which involves feeding historically significant quotes and photographs from the Middle East into an AI image tool. The resulting images reappropriate the symbolic and semantic significance of the emancipative moments they represent, and create a new category of image that complicates its own context and place within art history.

Esraa El Feky, a multimedia artist working with video, sculpture, drawing, sound, and installation. Her work unearths the complex relationships that exist between the natural world, the body, time, and the urban environment, and often uses the landscape of the desert as a site for reflection on historical and political events.

Esraa (in conversation with Nour El Safoury) will work on a project that will appropriate the language of travel literature and will take the form of a series of “dispatches” from Saint Catherine’s and Switzerland. The artist will explore the notions of metamorphosis and survival in these contrasting landscapes through the lifecycle of a rare and threatened species of butterfly.

Rania Atef, a visual artist who explores the notion of play across text, drawing, installation, and video, and is interested in investigating the infrastructure of care, motherhood, and reproductive/ Art labor discourses. She is one of the five members of the artist group K-oh-llective.

Rania will work on a project that will bring together drawings, folk songs, archival texts and personal memories to investigate the latent violence and systems of control that are passed on within the family – particularly in the relationship between mothers and children – and solidified through fairy tales, folk songs, and popular myths. 

The three awardees will be mentored by each of: artist Mahmoud Khaled, artist and curator Maha Maamoun, and writer Yasmine El Rashidi to develop their project and research further during the 6 months of the bursary program. A public event will be held at the conclusion of the program, in which awardees will present their projects to the general public. The bursary program runs till May/June 2023.