Gypsum Bursaries is a stipend and support program offered to visual artists to support their research towards the realization of a publication. It aims to generate new ways of thinking about art practice through working intimately with a larger community of artists, writers, and thinkers.

The initiative is open to citizens or residents of Egypt with creative and original publishing proposals in English, Arabic, or both, across various formats including: monographs, artist’s books, theme or medium-based publications, and whimsical and experimental forms. Project applications are accepted irrespective of age, years of experience, ethnicity, gender or religion. Applicants who applied in the previous edition of the Bursaries are eligible to reapply for another stage of the project. Collectives and duos are encouraged to apply. 

AMOUNT - 3 bursaries of EGP 40,000

DURATION - 1 year

APPLICATION DEADLINE - 29 February 2024. Results will be announced end of March 2024. 

SELECTION COMMITTEE - Successful projects will be chosen by a selection committee, composed of Mahmoud Khaled, Yasmine El Rashidi, and Maha Maamoun, along with the Bursaries team. More information about the selection committee can be found here

CHECKPOINTS - Two scheduled informal checkpoints will be coordinated by the Bursaries team with the recipients and the selection committee. The Bursaries team will also support the recipients by facilitating meetings or providing additional support throughout the  duration of Bursaries, either with committee members or external contributors.

TERMS & CONDITIONS

The Bursaries program seeks to support the development of publishing projects at various stages of completion. Applicants are required to choose a specific category which the stipend will cover: research, writing/editorial, design, production. 

At the end of the term, the recipient is invited to present a brief report in a format of their choosing on their research, in an informal and generative setting.

All copyright for the publication remains with the recipient of the fund. Any future publications produced through the support of the stipend should credit the Bursaries. 

ABOUT THE COMMITTEE MEMBERS

Mahmoud Khaled’s multidisciplinary artistic practice encompasses installation, video, photography, and publishing. His artist books include Fantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost it (2022), and MKMAEL Stories - An Image Passionate (2007). Discursive publications surrounding his practice include A Book on a Proposed House Museum for an Unknown Crying Man (2022) and A New Commission for an Old State (2017), among others. Khaled holds an MFA from Trondheim University in Norway (2017) and was a recipient of the DAAD fellowship for 2020. He lives and works between Cairo and Berlin.

Yasmine El Rashidi is an Egyptian writer. She is the author of Chronicle of a Last Summer, A Novel of Egypt, and The Battle for Egypt, Dispatches from the Revolution. She writes on politics and culture for The New York Review of Books, and is a contributing editor of the Middle East arts journal Bidoun. Her essays have appeared in publications including Artforum, Frieze, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times. She has worked on books for artists including Michael Joo and Julie Mehretu, and contributed essays to publications for The New Museum NYC, SFMOMA, Sharjah Art Foundation, among others. She was a fellow of The Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, The Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars in New York, and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and is an Academy Member for the Deutsche Borse Foundation Photography Prize. She lives in Cairo.

Maha Maamoun is an artist and curator working primarily with text, photography and video, and co-founder of the independent publishing platform Kayfa-ta. She is co-commissioning editor of How to maneuver: Shapeshifting texts and other publishing tactics (2020), a Kayf-ta publication aggregating knowledge around regional artistic and publishing practices, and curated an exhibition of the same name in Abu Dhabi, as well as two editions of How to reappear: Through the quivering leaves of independent publishing in Beirut (2019) and Amman (2020). She is one of the founding members of the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), established in Cairo in 2004. She lives and works in Cairo.

*For any inquiries, please contact aisha@gypsumgallery.com

*Artwork courtesy of Bursary 2023 recipient Esraa El Feky, and designer Aya Ayman.