01 Mar Tasmeem: Behind the Scenes Exhibition

Throughout the Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 academic year, I was honored to serve as a member of the “Tasmeem in the Classroom” sub-committee at VCUarts Qatar with Wajiha Pervez, Maryam Y Al-Homaid, and Mahmoud Abbas. This initiative aimed to engage faculty and students in the Tasmeem Doha Conference by showcasing projects developed around the theme of Hekayat (stories) within art and design practice.

“The concept of Hekayat (stories) in art and design can be understood through multiple lenses, connecting audiences with cultures, histories, and future visions. There is something magical that happens when a story emerges through a piece of art or design. Many projects developed in the classroom embrace storytelling as a method for creation and inspiration, resulting in various forms, mediums, perspectives, and pedagogies. The exhibition, Tasmeem In the Classroom – Behind the Scenes, invited the audience to take a journey through the different perspectives of VCUarts Qatar faculty and the ways in which they guide their students to imagine, create, interact, and locate stories in their creative work.”

As a committee, we worked together to solicit faculty participation in the exhibition, review student submissions, write exhibition content, organize judging, manage faculty files, curate the online exhibition content, and correspond with the exhibitions team about the facility requirements. The resulting “Behind the Scenes” exhibition ran from March 13 until April 3.

For the juried component of the exhibition, the Tasmeem conference co-chairs served as judges. This opened an opportunity, for those of us serving on the committee, to submit student work for potential inclusion in the show. As such, I was thrilled to have some of my student’s work on display in the exhibition.

The work accepted for exhibition as part of the “Behind the Scenes” exhibition comes from my Fall Typography 1 course, co-taught with Basma Hamdy in which we submitted two projects: bilingual typographic posters and diptych banners (for design across divides). We were so proud to have both of these two projects selected for inclusion alongside other projects created by esteemed faculty and creative students!