Mays Albaik’s interdisciplinary visual practice investigates how a sense of placehood is formed, reflected and refracted by that which mediates it – the body, language, and their various intersections. Crystalizing as performance, video, sculpture and installations, her work layers a personal poetics onto the sociopolitics that define our relationship to geography; looking for moments of immediate contact between place, body and language. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a B.Arch from the American University of Sharjah. Her first solo show ‘A Terranean Love Note’ opened in Tashkeel, Dubai in 2021، following her participation in the Critica Practice Program. An alumna of Salama Emerging Artist Fellowship (SEAF), she has participated in exhibitions including ‘Qala 0.8900’ (Darat Al Funun, Jordan); ‘Before We Were Banned’ (Helix Art Gallery, Brooklyn, New York); ‘Sawt 2a’ (Grey Noise, Dubai); ‘Mind the Gap’ (Tashkeel, Dubai), and ‘Change Coordinates + Someone Else’ (1971 Design Space, Sharjah). Mays’ early practice developed out of the oral narration of her family’s history, the story of her grandfather’s exile from Palestine, and the winding path through geopolitical and cultural landscapes that led to where she is now; a non-citizen resident of her country of birth.
