Shurooq Amin is a mixed-media interdisciplinary artist and Anglophone poet whose purpose is to instigate change in society. She has a PhD in Ekphrasis and has been published and anthologized internationally. She has also been a guest speaker and judge at various universities and events, and is the first Kuwaiti woman to appear on BBC’s HARD Talk (Nov 17, 2014). Shurooq has had 12 solo exhibitions and more than 40 group exhibitions. Her paintings have been sold at auctions, commissioned privately and publicly, awarded prizes locally and internationally, and shown at biennales and art fairs. Despite the shut down and censorship of her show, It’s a Man’s World, in March 2012 by Kuwaiti authorities, Shurooq was awarded the title of Artist of the Year by the Arab Woman Awards in April 2013. She has since become the first Kuwaiti female artist to be auctioned at Christie’s auction house and to exhibit at the Venice Biennale (56th International Venice Biennale, Italy, May to November 2015). Shurooq is currently preparing for her 2016 show: It’s a Mad World.
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Tonight, like all nights, men gather
in cafés, drinking heavy and bitter cups of tea,
smoking cigarettes, devouring sweets made
of dates that fell from trees, the mothers
of our otherwise deadly deserts
“When men ask me where I am from, I make them guess. It gives me pleasure to watch their eyebrows furrow, their lips twitch as they search for clues on my face as though it were a map.”