Shayma Aziz is a visual artist, whose work combines traditional fine arts technicality with new media practices, focussing particularly on painting, sculpture, interdisciplinary projects and animation. Born in Asyut, Shayma Aziz obtained her BFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Luxor, Egypt where she investigated representational formats in ancient Egyptian art, before she moved to New York where she currently works and resides. Her work has been exhibited widely, both in Egypt and abroad, including exhibitions in Berlin, New York, Thessaloniki, Tehran, Beirut, Budapest, Amsterdam and Marseilles. Some of her latest shows include her body portrait series “A state of body” that was shown in 392 Rmeil 393 contemporary art gallery in Beirut 2016/ Goethe Institute in Cairo 2018, her large scale drawing installation “Floating Over the Cairene Sky” that was exhibited in Giza, at Artellewa examining decay and the urban imagination, and “Women in Black” at ZicoHouse Beirut that mourns the disappearance of the female figure from public space in Arab cities. Aziz’s work centralizes the moving body as a site of questions, driving her to collaborate with movement artists and performers, and to produce movement-based still or moving visual work such as; ‘Take Me Back To Cairo’ performance-video, ‘Contrast in Still Motion’ drawing exhibition, or ‘Love Dance’ choreographic-animation. Her practice layers different visual cultures, and offers access to see their intersections and distances through a constant representation of time in her painted images, and installed spaces. Her New York Live Arts performance event “At WAR(k)”looks at fallen bodies, the poetics of war murals, and different temporalities between labour, work, oeuvre and making memory.
