Interest in Middle Eastern art has grown in recent years with individual pieces selling for millions of dollars. “yourmiddleeast.com” asked Joobin Bekhrad, founder of REORIENT and artclvb, to pick the hottest artists from the region.

Dr. Shurooq Amin is a Kuwaiti artist, poet, and university professor, whose work largely deals with sociocultural issues in Arab society, as well as the role of women and men.

Amin’s works have been exhibited and auctioned around the world, and her latest series – which will be unveiled shortly.

Her paintings can be found at the Bayan Palace/Amiri Diwan (Kuwait), the Museum of Modern Art (Kuwait), OPEC headquarters (Vienna), the Shiseido company (Paris), private international art groups (Mirca Art Group, Sweden), local private companies, and in private collections in New York, Damascus, Dubai, Cairo, Amsterdam, London, Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Her work has been sold at auctions (including Christie’s), been commissioned privately and publicly, awarded various prizes locally and internationally, and shown at biennales and art fairs. She has appeared on numerous interviews on local and international television, as well as newspapers, journals, and magazines, such as Reuters, Marie Claire, Arabian Business, Financial Times, Gulf News, The Daily News, Al-Arabiya, etc. A retrospective of her work was recently featured in the biannual art journal Contemporary Practices: Visual Arts from the Middle East. Her 2010 series The Society Girls was exhibited at the Tilal Gallery in November 2010, and became an urban cult in private collections. Her series entitled The Bullet Series was shown at London’s Lahd Gallery in March 2011 for six weeks. The work was a series of socio-political paintings which culminated with a Hornet bullet being shot through each painting with a rifle at a range of 50 meters by the artist. A documentary accompanied the show, and the original bullet casing accompanied each painting.

Her paintings can be found at the Bayan Palace/Amiri Diwan (Kuwait), the Museum of Modern Art (Kuwait), OPEC headquarters (Vienna), the Shiseido company (Paris), private international art groups (Mirca Art Group, Sweden), local private companies, and in private collections in New York, Damascus, Dubai, Cairo, Amsterdam, London, Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Her work has been sold at auctions (including Christie’s), been commissioned privately and publicly, awarded various prizes locally and internationally, and shown at biennales and art fairs. She has appeared on numerous interviews on local and international television, as well as newspapers, journals, and magazines, such as Reuters, Marie Claire, Arabian Business, Financial Times, Gulf News, The Daily News, Al-Arabiya, etc. A retrospective of her work was recently featured in the biannual art journal Contemporary Practices: Visual Arts from the Middle East. Her 2010 series The Society Girls was exhibited at the Tilal Gallery in November 2010, and became an urban cult in private collections. Her series entitled The Bullet Series was shown at London’s Lahd Gallery in March 2011 for six weeks. The work was a series of socio-political paintings which culminated with a Hornet bullet being shot through each painting with a rifle at a range of 50 meters by the artist. A documentary accompanied the show, and the original bullet casing accompanied each painting.

Shurooq’s series “It’s a Man’s World” was exhibited on the 5th of March 2012 at Al M Gallery in Kuwait and was supposed to run for 3 weeks but was shut down by the local Kuwait authorities after 3 hours on the premise that the artworks were “pornographic” and “Anti-Islamic”, a false accusation. It is interesting to note, moreover, that the shut down took place without a legal court warrant and hence this unprecedented incident in the history of Kuwait and impingement on art & freedom of expression occurred illegally.

Shurooq’s poetry has been published into two books to date, in more than 40 literary journals across the globe, and has been anthologized in the Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Arabian Gulf Poetry by Ithaca Publishers in association with the Virginia Commonwealth University of Qatar. Her second volume of poetry “The Hanging of the Wind” is taught as part of the contemporary literature curriculum in universities in the Gulf. She is the first Kuwaiti to be nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize in December 2007 in the USA.

http://www.shurooqamin.com