15 March 2013
Munira Al Sayegh, technically according to my passport its Muneera, same pronunciation, just funny lettering, and as of this moment I am 23. I work as an assistant producer on the Houwi Project, which is a multimedia platform for story telling at NYU, with our partners Sheikha Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation, The National Center for Documentation and Research, and TwoFour54. Three things no one knows about me is the fact that I am conversational in Tagalog, I can redo any accent I fall in love with, and that when I was a kid I thought I would grow up to be an astronaut. My favourite definition for art as we see it was given to me by my elementary school teacher, he said, art is for anyone and everyone, art can be found in everyday objects, and can live where you least expect it. I grew with that idea very closely, and began to create art at a high level in high school, where the definition of art altered and took a more personal tone. Art to me at the time, was a process of creation through the translation of thoughts onto physical objects, be it sculpture, or painting. I pursued History of Art for my undergraduate, again pushing my definition deeper from its initial base. By the end of my studies, I started to see and analyse art critically giving me a more academic approach to it, thus giving my definition more tone.
Art became a means of documentation of human activities, and their translation into products, be it cave paintings, sculpture, photography, literature, performing arts or architecture. Art is a window, which one is welcome to peek into, in order to further understand a culture, religion, time, and a population. The main reasons as to why I applied for this fellowship firstly is for the cultural exchange, secondly to get to know other fellow art enthusiasts of the UAE and finally to deeper my understanding and awareness in a curatorial sense, of how one can portray their country through art, in a foreign land. Assumptions I have that correlate with this trip, is that Venice will be a city where you can wander around constantly feeding your thoughts, that no matter how much time you spend there, you will want to spend a few more days to continue discovering, and finally that I may have found the one population that loves coffee as much as I do.
