Biography
Shayma Aziz is a New York based visual artist, whose work combines traditional fine arts technicality with new
media practices, focussing particularly on painting, sculpture, interdisciplinary projects and
animation. Born in Asyut, Egypt. Shayma Aziz obtained her BFA in painting from the Faculty
of Fine Arts in Luxor, where she investigated representational formats in ancient Egyptian art,
before she moved to Cairo and actively engaged in its growng art scene for 17 years. She
received several production and residency grants including Al Mawred Al Thaqafi’s Artist
Production Grant, Centre d’Arte i Natura/Spanish Embassy in Cairo 2010 and L’officina
Marseille 2011.
Her work has been exhibited widely, both in Egypt and abroad, including exhibitions in Berlin,
New York, Thessaloniki, Tehran, Beirut, Budapest, Amsterdam and Marseilles. Some of her
latest shows include her large scale ink painting series “A state of body” that was shown in 392
Rmeil 393 contemporary art gallery in Beirut 2016/ Goethe Institute in Cairo 2018, her
drawing installation “Floating Over the Cairene Sky” that was exhibited in Giza, at Artellewa
examining decay, the taboo/criminilization of Public Display of Affection and the urban
imagination, and “Women in Black” at ZicoHouse Beirut that mourns the disappearance of the
female figure from public space in Arab cities.
Aziz’s work centralizes the moving body as a site of questions, driving her to collaborate with
movement artists and performers, and to produce movement-based still or moving visual work
such as; ‘Take Me Back To Cairo’ performance-video, ‘Contrast in Still Motion’ drawing
exhibition, or ‘Love Dance’ choreographic-animation. Her practice layers different visual
cultures, and offers access to see their intersections and distances through a constant
representation of time in her painted images, and installed spaces. Her New York Live Arts
painting/performance live mural “At WAR(k)” Live Ideas Festival 2016 looks at fallen bodies,
the poetics of war murals, mass immigration and different temporalities between labour,
dreamers, dance, drowning and making memory.