Lizzy Vartanian Collier aka Gallery Girl is a writer and curator based in London. Her work has been featured in publications including Dazed, Hyperallergic and Vogue Arabia. She was curator of Perpetual Movement during AWAN Festival 2018 and in 2019 had a residency at the Lab at Darat Al Funun in Amman, Jordan. She has also worked with Armenia Art Fair for its inaugural edition and previously worked as an editor at I.B.Tauris Publishers. In 2019 she co-founded Arsheef, Yemen’s first contemporary art gallery. She has given workshops at Manara Culture in Amman, Jordan and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK.
As of 2020 she is currently in law school, with the ambition of greater understanding the intersection between art and the law.
On this episode of the Gallery Girl podcast I am joined by Amani AlThuwaini, a Kuwaiti mixed media artist and designer born in Ukraine. She believes that the cultural duality she inherited through her Kuwaiti-Ukrainian roots greatly influenced her unique awareness of identity and culture, impelling her to explore this in her work
Samar’s artworks explore the possibilities of expanding the internalised boundaries of meaning-making, drawing inspiration from various craft traditions.
In this episode I’m joined by Elina Sairanen and Wadha Al-Aqeedi, founders of Mathqaf, a platform that publishes, researches, curates, collaborates and champions art from West Asia and North Africa.