Scholarships and Capacity Building
The CAP offered 20 new scholarships to students of music, performing arts or other closely related fields. These included 13 scholarships in music and four in theatre and dancing that helped students pursue their education at various institutes and universities around the world. The CAP also offered three scholarships in other art fields. Five students earned BA and MA degrees with support from the CAP. Most of the graduates have worked in their respective fields, produced their own new art projects and/or participated in a variety of art projects.
In cooperation with its partners, the CAP continued to offer a variety of artist residency opportunities to visual and performing artists. These included residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts (International City of Arts), Paris, UNIDEE - University of Ideas, the formative residential programme developed by Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto, Italy, and Tunis. A total of 10 artists joined various artist residency programmes.
The CAP played a major role in developing and implementing three focused training programmes. Two training events on visual arts and theatre were organised in Gaza in partnership with Eltiqa Group and Basma Society for Culture and Arts respectively. A third training workshop on writing about pictures brought together almost 50 male and female young artists, writers and others interested in improving their skills and expertise. A total 217 young, new and dedicated artists participated in new projects. These included 66 female artists.
In addition, the CAP continued to support the culture and art scene in Palestine, promote Palestine’s visibility abroad, and empower more artists to enhance their expertise and skills by providing opportunities for education, training, artist residencies or by involvement in new art productions. Along this vein, the CAP offered a variety of grants and organised different interventions and events.
The CAP facilitated the engagement of artists in new, outstanding cultural or knowledge-based productions led or supported by the AMQF, furnishing an opportunity for artists to make a living partially or wholly by working in the cultural field. To this avail, the CAP supported 26 new performing and visual art projects. Informed by quality and professional criteria, specialist juries chose these from among dozens of other projects. Selections were made within the framework of the Qattan Grant for Performing Arts and Selat: Links through the Arts in partnership with the Prince Claus Fund, YAYA 2016 and seasonal grants. All these allowed an opportunity to dozens of artists to engage in projects. For their work in these projects, a large number of artists were paid for participating in production processes, performances, etc. A number of the projects also allowed some young artists to take part in training and capacity building programmes, which helped to improve their skills and expertise and secure a livelihood of future engagement in the art field.
Another noteworthy event was the Writing about Pictures course, which could provide an inspiring model in terms of its organisation, funding and implementation. Led by the AMQF, five institutions have joined forces to bring this course into reality. It has formed an interface of many tracks in visual arts and various practices from around the world. Participants managed to reflect on visual art practices in the Palestinian context as well as its relation with different contexts.
As a result, eight texts that revolved around, or were inspired by, art works and practices were produced in the context of the Qalandiya International Festival 2016. These contributions were published in the Cultural Supplement of Al-Ayyam newspaper. They will also be posted on Ibraaz (http://www.ibraaz.org/), paving the way for Ibraaz to shift to publishing texts in Arabic.