Shurooq Amin / A Controversial Arab Artist

“We are all capable of making our existence palpable, of changing the world one person at a time, poem by poem, painting by painting, story by story, hand by hand, one voice at a time” Shurooq Amin

Shurooq Amin is a Kuwaiti conceptual/mixed media interdisciplinary artist and an Anglophone poet, renowned for her controversial subject matter and taboo images.

On Monday March 5th 2012, a new gallery opened in Kuwait City titled “It’s A Man’s World” by Shurooq Amin. Around 10 PM, Shurooq was asked to close down her gallery due to complaints from “people” who reached out to the authorities. She was later notified by the police that she must immediately shutdown her gallery. They accused her work of being “pornographic” in nature.

Laghoo is presenting some of Shurooq’s controversial paintings

Shurooq’s 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, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Her work has been sold at auctions, 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 television, including MBC, as well as newspapers, journals, and magazines, such as Marie Claire. 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 has become an urban cult in private collections. Her most recent work 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 is currently working on exploring the secret, taboo underworld of Middle Eastern men: straight, gay, traditional, liberal, and islamic fundamentalists in a series she calls (ironically) “It’s a Man’s World”.