BFA+MFA 2022

I started off by soaking the canvas fabric in ink and water and leaving it for 2 weeks. I wanted to get the ocean's surface on the canvas.

I gathered my grandfather's poetry archive and scanned them, by doing that I was able to get ideas on how I will be projecting them with the

This is how the canvas turned out to be and the poems next to it was my first thought process, to print the poems larger.

Here I tried projecting them on the canvas, it turned out to be interesting and this is where I thought of creating a video .

I went to Al wakra beach and souq waqif to take some pictures of where my grandfather used to live and sail from. I'll be using a slide proj

I decided to go on a larger scale since the ocean is huge. This way it would allow me to project 2 projectors, one with pictures and the oth

Alya Alkaabi

فوق موج البحر

Painting and Printmaking

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My name is Alya Alkaabi, a 22 year old Qatari artist. In my practice, I seek inspiration from the beauty in the mundane, the everyday and the surreal. My art is what my mind sees, just like cloud watching people, they see a lot of shaped clouds and I see my next new painting. 

For this project I sought inspiration from my grandfather’s poetry archives, scribbled on random pieces of paper, receipts, and notebooks, showing the wear and tear of time. I was interested in the juxtaposition of his words and their implied meanings, describing the seafaring life from a subjective and deeply personal perspective, with the visual imagery of the sea. 

My grandfather, Ibrahim, was the captain, Al-Nokhatha, an old Gulf term for the owner and captain of a fishing and trading ship. He used to sail for months for pearl diving with his friends. Ibrahim was a published poet, he would write poems about Qatar, the sea, the pearls, love and many more.

My project is to showcase some of his poems onto the canvas mimicking the sea. To create the effect of the sea on the canvas, I worked with a 6 meters long canvas fabric, which I kept in water and blue ink for 4 days. A video of the ocean with the poetry on top sliding through the canvas just like the waves. The handwritten poems in a display covered with acrylic in front of the canvas for the viewer to see it. 

نركب سفن دلجه بها نضرب يواش …  والموج من شد الهوى فوقنا يطيش 

نصبر على ذاك التعب فيه والراش … لو كان فيه من العنا حاجة العيش 

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