Campus Art Dubai is the first programme of its kind in the UAE: an intensive six-month seminar and residency programme providing UAE-based artists with the opportunity to develop their practices under the mentorship of world-renowned tutors and showcase their work at Art Dubai. Following the educational part of the programme, artists participate in a two-month residency, during which they receive support in transforming and developing their initial research ideas into work, which are exhibited in a group show.

CAD 7.0 artists Dima Srouji, Augustine Paredes, Jumairy and Mohamed Khalid examined the role of artists and artist communities within the city. Specifically looking at Dubai, the artists were invited to think of their relationship with the city and how the city’s fabric is tied back to them as artists, and vice versa, how art is tied back to the city.

The culminating group show, “Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Contemporary Art in the City”, focused on introspection, reflection and self-critique. Dubai Culture & Arts Authority is the Strategic Partner of Campus Art Dubai. Campus Art Dubai is supported by Fondazione Cultura e Arte.

Mirror Mirror On The Wall: Contemporary Art And The City,  the seventh edition of Campus Art Dubai focused on introspection, reflection and self-critique. Through a series of seminars, the group land interrogated the role of artists and artist communities within the city and what responsibilities the city has towards them. The role of contemporary art in the making of Dubai as “Dubai” was also examined. The programme explored topics ranging from the history of urban design, performance art in and of landscape, gentrification, and artist community building.

Dima Srouji is a Palestinian architect currently an Assistant Visiting Professor of Architecture at the American University of Sharjah. She earned a Master of Architecture degree from Yale University and a Bachelor of Architecture Honours from Kingston University in London. Her work explores intersectionalities of art and architecture through historic strata and spatial edges, and questioning issues of place.

Srouji’s work, What is Yet to Be Already Is, explores the absence of a sense of time and space in the city of Dubai by examining the idea of the constantly unfinished and the never-ending.

Augustine Paredes is a Filipino multimedia artist based in the UAE. Lyrical, contemporary, and sensuous, Augustine’s visual narrative derives from his many-storied travels, questions on belonging, and, South East Asian consciousness and gaze.

Paredes exhibited Cooking Adobo at the Hea(r)t of 25.2048° N, 55.2708° E, part of an ongoing series of self-portraits aimed to materialise how he has been shaped by the two years he has spent living in Dubai.

Jumairy, born in Dubai in 1992, uses experimentation with sound, film, digital technologies and performance to create an immersive world composed of sensory experiences. Traces and allusions more than closed, finite productions, these experiences occupy and transform spaces, becoming provocations that usher viewers from their present time and place into imagined realms.

Jumiary presented: The Mission, a performance piece spreading a message of love.

Mohamed Khalid is an artist from Dubai, who’s work is about Dubai; people, places, things, stories. His practice involves examining both collective and personal narratives in the city. The artist treats medium as an outcome rather than process which allows him to employ an experimental approach in his artworks.

Khalid’s performance, Local Art Tour, was a guided walk through Mina A’Salam hotel comprised of fictional narratives of the artworks on display there.

CAD 7.0 participants were tutored by Uzma Z. Rizvi and Murtaza Vali, alongside Guest Curator Munira Al Sayegh, as well as a number of Dubai-based gallerists including Asmaa Al Shabibi (Lawrie Shabibi Gallery), Kourosh Nouri (Carbon 12), and Ead Samawi (Ayyam Gallery).

Murtaza Vali is a Brooklyn and Sharjah-based critic and curator. He regularly publishes in various international art periodicals and has presented exhibitions at and contributed to publications for non-profit institutions, art fairs and commercial galleries around the globe. He is a Visiting Instructor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and a member of Art Jameel’s Curatorial Council.

Uzma Z. Rizvi is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at the Pratt Institute of Art and Design, Brooklyn, where she teaches anthropology, ancient urbanism, critical heritage studies, art and social change and the postcolonial critique. Rizvi is also a Visiting Researcher in the Department of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah. Rizvi (w/ Amal Khalaf) directed Art Dubai’s 2016 Global Art Forum, The Future Was.

Munira Al Sayegh holds an undergraduate degree from University of London’s School of African and Oriental Studies in History of Art and Archaeology, with a focus on the Middle East. Once she moved back to Abu Dhabi, Al Sayegh worked with New York University Abu Dhabi as an assistant producer on the FIND project in 2012. From that she continued on, as co-curator of Art Dubai Projects 2014, assistant curator of Emirati Expressions 2015, and curator of Bayn: the in-between, the third edition of U.A.E Unlimited 2017. Al Sayegh worked on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project as a programmes officer from 2015-2017 and curated Abu Dhabi Art Talks program 2017. Al Sayegh sits on the advisory council board of the NYUAD gallery. She has participated in various panels, lectures and has published articles on the contemporary art scene of the region.