Ayyam Gallery Al Quoz, Dubai, is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Popcornographic by the Kuwaiti artist Shurooq Amin, a new series of 15 paintings all of which challenge conventional perceptions of what it is to be a woman and a Muslim in 21st-Century Kuwait. Having divorced and forged a career as a successful artist, Amin is compelled to address problems she herself has endured and survived.
Amin marries two aesthetics throughout this body of work. There is flesh on show suggesting freedom, but mouths are also gagged, alluding to oppression and a lack of freedom of speech. Sex and religious fervour also repeatedly collide and Amin precisely entwines them to comment on political and social conventions.
Rather than courting controversy, Amin invites her viewer to begin a conversation and urges that, though unorthodox, change must be embraced for people to coexist peacefully and with respect. There is a new cultural landscape through which the citizens of divided nations must navigate and Shurooq Amin takes the first steps here. She states, “I’m trying to confront the taboos that remain in our society, the disastrous ramifications of which are damaging us all.”