Dom Art Projects presents, Studio, Wounds, and Battles, a Dom Art Projects Studio Support Program Presentation, curated by Alisa Bagdonaite.

Participating Artists: Aisha Alhammadi; Divyaaunshi Purohit; Joumana Mortada; Meher Afroz Vahid; Rabila Kidwai; Sara Masinae; Teng Miras.

The artist’s studio is a very particular space. It is a place of creative freedom, experiments, and artistic missteps. A space where a work can take form, evolve, or fail, only to be abandoned or started anew. Here an artist can push their practice, make mistakes, and try again, until the work is at last ready to be shared with spectators, critics, curators, or collectors.

This presentation of Dom Art Projects’ Studio Support Program borrows its title from artist Cathy de Monchaux’s recent retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo. “Studio, Wounds, and Battles” seemed to us a perfect encapsulation of those less perfect aspects of the creative process, which are normally swept out of sight from the viewer.

We recognize that support for artists might not always take the form of exhibitions, grants, or commissions. Sometimes support simply means having a space where—even if only for a short time—you don’t have anything to prove to anyone but yourself. A space where work is not obliged to be successful, fully finished, or even ever shown to anyone.

For this reason, when we launched the Studio Support Program, we did not frame it around the production of new works, nor establish any other set objectives. For us, it was important to provide the participants with space and time, which each artist could decide to use as best fits their own practice.

What you see before you should thus not be considered as a progress report or a showcase of the program’s achievements. In keeping with the experimental nature of the studio, the works vary in their level of completion. Some objects already operate as fully realized art works, while others remain in an intermediate stage, as fragments of research, sketches, or components of a much larger process.

This exhibition also does not attempt to turn the process into its own kind of a result, but rather to present artistic practice in a full spectrum of possible stages, the battles and the wounds, included.