In line with its format of residence exchanges, the Milan-based organization FARE has started a collaboration with Maraya Art Centre (United Arab Emirates). Last March, Italian artist Eva Frapiccini presented her work in progress Dream’s Time Capsule in Sharjah and Dubai. It’s now the turn of UAE artist and musician Jumairy to come in Italy and work in a new project at Frigoriferi Milanesi, from September 1st to 25th 2016, under the direction of curatorial team Francesco Urbano Ragazzi.

Born in Dubai in 1992, Jumairy develops his own research connecting his studies of psychology and marketing (Middlesex University) to an intense experimentation with sound. The combination produces a range of sensory experiences, traces more than closed works, that spread from real space to the Internet. The artist infuses his imagery with a dark psychedelia that is expressed through performative acts, scientific experiments and mysterious rituals which happen on stage, the big screen and smartphone apps. The same can be said of his approach to music production, in which the Arabic electro-pop is intertwined with sounds à la Marilyn Manson.

But Jumairy is not just a teen idol who speaks to the new generation of Emiratis. Many of his works are indeed conceived to process traumas, both personal and collective. Just this year for example, the artist, commissioned by Art Dubai and Delfina Foundation, has dedicated a project to insomnia as an expression of social anxiety in competitive, market-oriented environments. It is The Sleepless Pe-Tal, a clinic for  treating sleep disorders through sound frequencies. The work took shape in a series of habitable installations between the halls of the art fair, a workshop at Rashid School for Boys, and an online platform: www.thesleeplesspetal.com.

During his stay in Italy, Jumairy will explore the city soundscapes, getting to the heart of the art and music scene in Milan. In the months following his departure, the inspirations and impulses of the residence will be processed remotely in an online diary that the artist will share from Dubai. FARE residency program thus puts the bases for an organic production process in which the artist’s personal research opens up to the discovery of the urban context and its mediatic propagation.

Following this approach, FARE  has entrusted the curatorship of the program to Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, who will weave a network of relationships and narratives around Jumairy’s work. The duo, not new to these working methods, will then trace the path by hosting Jumairy’s diary on the social channels of The Internet Saga, the research platform the curators initiated in 2015 with a solo show by Jonas Mekas on the occasion of the 56th Venice Biennale.

The grand finale will be in December 19th 2016, when Jumairy will return to Milan to present the results of the residence.

Press Release