SHUBBAK FESTIVAL
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SHUBBAK FESTIVAL 〰️
STRATEGIC ARTISTIC PRODUCING & DELIVERY
London, UK
Arts Council England, British Council, Qattan Foundation
At Shubbak Festival, I led the strategic production of artist-led and participatory commissions within an international platform dedicated to contemporary Arab artistic practice.
Working across a complex multi-stakeholder festival infrastructure, my role encompassed programme planning, artist collaboration, participant frameworks, safeguarding oversight, and exhibition delivery. The projects operated at the intersection of diasporic cultural memory, feminist practice, and contemporary political discourse, requiring both rigorous governance and sensitive relational facilitation.
Through this work, I contributed to strengthening models of socially engaged production within large-scale festival contexts, ensuring that artistic ambition and ethical accountability remained structurally aligned.
EVERY ACT OF RECOGNITION ALTERS WHAT SURVIVES,
BY RAND ABDUL JABBAR
London, UK
Led the end-to-end delivery of a major participatory commission for Shubbak Festival, working in close collaboration with internationally exhibited Iraqi artist Rand Abdul Jabbar and a cohort of London-based Iraqi women.
Within a complex festival environment, I oversaw the full project lifecycle - from programme design and stakeholder coordination to participant recruitment, workshop facilitation, production logistics, and public presentation. I managed relationships across artist, participants, festival team, and venue partners, ensuring artistic integrity while safeguarding participant care within a diasporic and intergenerational context.
The project unfolded through a sustained workshop series exploring memory, migration, heritage, and collective identity. I structured an inclusive and critically informed creative process that supported participants to translate lived experience into material form, navigating sensitive narratives with cultural nuance and ethical attention.
The commission culminated in a large-scale installation at Chelsea Physic Garden, where the final sculptural work reinterpreted Assyrian iconography through a contemporary feminist lens, embedding collective authorship within a high-profile international festival setting.
This project demonstrated my capacity to bridge artistic ambition with socially engaged practice, creating space for underrepresented voices while delivering complex cultural production within institutional frameworks.
THE DISTANT HERE
London, UK
Produced and delivered The Distant Here, a multi-site, three-week public art commission presented as part of Shubbak Festival, activating culturally significant locations across West London through a distributed walking exhibition model.
Working closely with writers Heba Hayek and Yara Hawari, I led the full realisation of the project from concept development to public presentation. This included commissioning coordination, contractual negotiations, and cross-border collaboration with contributors across Europe and the Middle East, alongside design development with typographer Farah Fayyad to translate literary text into large-scale public-facing works.
The project required complex multi-stakeholder management across commercial billboard operators, independent shop owners, venue partners, and local authorities. I negotiated advertising placements, secured permissions, coordinated installation logistics, and oversaw compliance within highly visible public urban environments. The result was a dispersed exhibition embedded within everyday city infrastructure — bus stops, shopfronts, and billboards — transforming commercial advertising space into sites of diasporic reflection and political memory.
Positioned as a bibliographic “treasure hunt”, the project invited audiences to navigate West London through literary fragments addressing displacement, migration, and collective resistance, re-situating Palestinian and Arab narratives within the fabric of the city. The commission received coverage in Frieze, amplifying its critical reception within international art discourse.
Through The Distant Here, I demonstrated advanced capability in large-scale public realm production, transnational artist liaison, urban site negotiation, and politically sensitive cultural programming — delivering a high-visibility intervention that bridged literature, design, and spatial strategy within a major international festival framework.
