Amani Al-Thuwaini is a Kuwaiti artist/designer, born in Ukraine in 1989. She holds a Bachelor degree in Architecture from Kuwait University, which has influenced her methodical approach of collecting information and meticulous approach to designing and creating artwork. In 2017, Al-Thuwaini received her MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Subsequently, she was shortlisted for the Warsteiner BLOOOM Award in 2017 and in 2018 she was selected to attend the International Designer’s workshop at the V&A Museum, London. She has exhibited extensively throughout London and Kuwait and has also shown her work in Prague, Dubai, Brazil and Bolivia. She worked as an architect, educator, interior designer, content creator and visual merchandiser.
Al-Thuwaini continues to push the boundaries of multidisciplinary through the exploration of art, craft and design. Al Thuwaini established Dazzalab which is the outcome of her MFA thesis “A Criticism on the Contemporary Dowry Vessels in Kuwait”, where she challenges the limited standing of accumulated objects and precious crafts. It is a company that rethinks and recreates dowry vessels as objects of personalized art and design. 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. This duality offers a unique perspective, whereby she can often see through the eyes of the ‘other’, consciously becoming the spectator; observing, analyzing and absorbing the varying facets that form cultural identities.
Using an interdisciplinary approach, Al-Thuwaini combines individual and collective narratives with symbols that are open to differing cultural interpretations. She reveals the juncture where identities converge and exposes behaviors and rituals that are often taken for granted. Themes of luxury and socio-politics relevant to Kuwait and the Gulf region are emphasized in her work.
Employing mixed media and two-dimensional forms within her work, Al-Thuwaini aims to expose this cultural collision by incorporating insinuations of modernism, superficial display, commodity fetishism and gender. Her resulting works are a candid response to the commodification and changes of traditions and customs; hybrids that represent a far more ‘globalized’ ritual.
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