Alserkal Arts Foundation
Organised by Robert Deguzman with Majd Alloush and Dr. Dennis Gupa
The Museum of Migration and Memory: A Moving and Living Museum is a community art workshop organised by Robert Deguzman with Majd Alloush and Dr. Dennis Gupa.
The Museum of Migration and Memory is a practice led research project that explores how we are shaped by our personal histories and collective memories and hopes to imagine alternative communities of belonging. The project attempts to address shared concerns such as, “How might migrants and their communities per/form the narrative of their own experiences?” and “Can artistic intervention help articulate these experiences and make them accessible while maintaining authenticity and sincerity?”
As a multi-sited ethnographic research of migrant experiences that includes community art workshops and interviews, the workshop intends to foreground the voices of displaced communities in shaping their narratives.
The workshop involves carbon copy drawing/painting around the question “How is a place changed when migrants leave?”, as well as an ethnographic interview of your own experiences of migration.
Workshop materials and refreshments will be provided during the workshop.
Limited to 15 participants. Please RSVP by Monday 22 August to reserve your place.
This project is funded by New York University Abu Dhabi’s Research Kitchens. The NYUAD Research Kitchens are an initiative of the Arts and Humanities Division. For information about the themes, projects, researchers, and Kitchen activities, please visit this website.
Biographies
Robert Deguzman graduated cum laude with a BA in Theater Arts from University of the Philippines-Diliman under a UP Office for the Initiatives of Culture and Arts scholarship and with an International Diploma from Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan under a Association of International Education in Japan scholarship. He production managed, acted, directed and wrote theater plays for Philippine’s UP Theater Company, UP Playwright’s Theater and UP Experimental Theater. He also wrote and directed plays for the Filipino Theater Company at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. His works as a playwright has won him awards from Philippine’s most prestigious literary competition, the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. He is a Theater Arts Instructor-Production Manager for the Theater Program of New York University Abu Dhabi. He is currently taking up his MA in Performance: Society from Central Saint Martins, University of Arts London.
Majd Alloush is a Syrian artist whose work spans multiple disciplines including printmaking, sculpture, photography, moving image, installation and performance. His creative practice challenges the notion of borders in concept, content, and medium, by exploring geopolitics, and social and environmental issues such as the ramifications of war and displacement. Alloush strategically creates work wherein multiple interpretations are possible, requiring the viewer’s own worldview to inform the meaning. His work is situated within contemporary hybrid practice, at the intersection of traditional processes and innovative methodology. Alloush holds a BFA from the University of Sharjah, Class of 2018, and is currently pursuing his MFA in Art and Media at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Dr. Dennis Gupa is a theatre director, applied theatre practitioner, and performance researcher of Asian Theatre, Southeast Asian-Canadian Theatre, and diasporic performance and dramaturgy in Canada. His scholarly and artistic interest in Canadian intercultural theatre conceived by the diasporic communities gestures towards an intersectional, decolonial, and emancipated world making. As a former Vanier scholar, Dr. Gupa wrote his dissertation on sea rituals, climate change, and Indigenous ecological knowledge in island communities in the Philippines impacted by climate crises. His interdisciplinary creative research builds on an ethnographic, lived, and theoretical inquiry on climate justice and the practical mobilization of re-futuring climate crises by looking at the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of diasporic performance making and transnational collaboration.