Downtown Cairo Print

Shayma Aziz is visual artist, whose work combines traditional fine arts technicality with new media practices, focusing particularly on painting, sculpture, interdisciplinary projects and animation. Born in Asyut, Egypt. Shayma Aziz obtained her BFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Luxor, where she investigated representational formats in ancient Egyptian art before she moved to Cairo and actively engaged in its growing art scene for 17 years. She received several production and residency grants including Al Mawred Al Thaqafi’s Artist Production Grant, Centre d’Arte i Natura/Spanish Embassy in Cairo 2010 L’officina Marseille 2011 and 3rd place prize at Caravan’s Global Mosaic exhibition 2019. She moved to New York in the spring of 2019 where she's currently based. Her work has been exhibited widely, both in Egypt and abroad including exhibitions in Berlin, New York, Thessaloniki, Tehran, Beirut, Tunis, Terni, Amsterdam and Marseilles. Some of her latest shows include her large scale ink painting series “A state of body” that was shown in 392 Rmeil 393 contemporary art gallery in Beirut 2016/ Goethe Institute in Cairo 2018, her drawing installation “Floating Over the Cairene Sky” that was exhibited in Cairo at Artellewa Arts Space, examining urban decay and the taboo/criminalization of “public display of affection” in Egypt. “Women in Black” at ZicoHouse Beirut 2009 that mourns the disappearance of the female figure from public space in Arab cities depicting figures in ghostly poses borrowed from Modern Art history's dominant male gaze on her canvas. Her New York Live Arts painting/performance live mural “At WAR(k)” at Live Ideas Festival : MENA/Future Cultural Transformations in the Middle East North Africa Region 2016 looks at fallen bodies, the poetics of war murals, mass immigration and different temporalities between labour, dreamers, dance and drowning.