ABU DHABI – Warehouse421, the home-grown arts and design center dedicated to showcasing and nurturing creative production across the region, has launched the “Warehouse421 Homebound Residency Program”.
The program aims to support creative practitioners in the MENASA region in producing work and exploring digital forms of community engagement in their practices while socially-isolating.
The residency program will offer residents a production budget that can go up to AED 30,000 that will go into the equipment and materials for the realization of their projects. Applications will be available online on 17 June 2020, until 18 July 2020.
This program is aligned with Warehouse421’s commitment to deepening engagement with the creative community and contributing to the regional cultural ecosystem. It aims to encourage creative practitioners to investigate new methods of community engagement, especially during times when the social sphere has been shifted with drastic speed into the digital. The residency will also challenge creatives to think deeply about connection, communication, and multidimensional interaction with their communities, and the various ways the public resides digitally.
Commenting on the new program, Faisal Al Hassan, Head of Warehouse421, said: “ It was Warehouse421’s objective this year to launch a residency program that provides creative practitioners from the UAE and the region the opportunity and support to explore community engagement in their practices while in residence at our space in Abu Dhabi. The current circumstances provided us with an opportunity to rethink the existing framework and engage with creatives within their own spaces.”
Residents will have the opportunity to select their mentors, who will guide them throughout the residency process and towards building a new body of work looking out beyond the current pandemic, working towards a digital outcome.
Al Hassan also added: “We encourage applicants to think of this moment and the moment right after, of creative delivery during and beyond the pandemic.”
The Warehouse421 Homebound Residency Program is open to all creative practitioners, including but not limited to Visual Arts and Curation, Design and Technology, Literary Arts, Music, Culinary Arts, Theater, and Performance, in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia region. Applications will be available online tomorrow in both Arabic and English starting from 17 June 2020, and the deadline for submission is 18 July 2020.
