International Art Residency Programme at Stal Gallery

[gallery columns='4' link='file' ids='350490,350489,350488,350487'] Mai al Abri - Stal Gallery & Studio is hosting Janin Walter, a new resident artist from Berlin who joined the gallery on Monday last. The three-week residency programme is the outcome of a collaboration with Goethe Institut Gulf Region which also provides support to German artists in this exchange programme. The gallery aims to develop projects in collaboration with artists, and is in itself a site of artistic production with an associated residential artists’ studio. The goal is to provide a venue and facilities in Muscat for audiences and artists, primarily visual artists to offer the highest standards of design, programme and exhibition and engagement, with national and international profiles. Hassan Meer, the Curator and Artistic Director of Stal Gallery, said that the programme’s goal is to provide artists with the chance to discover Oman, one of region’s most stunningly beautiful and unconventional destinations with its rich heritage and cultural life, thus inspiring them to create new works in the realm of visual arts. “Stal Gallery fosters more than the artistic exchange”, says Dr Gabriele Landwehr, Director of the Goethe-Institut Gulf Region. “It provides an intercultural platform for the German resident artists to meet and talk to Omani artists and people from the community alike. Thus, it is the perfect place for the Goethe-Institut to keep a dialogue between our societies alive. Artists in the past years have exhibited in Germany the works they had created in Muscat. Last year’s Verena Kyselka has shown the Omani songbook already once at Kunsthaus Bethanien in Berlin and will again exhibit it in the Academy of Fine Arts in March; the people loved it. With Janin Walter I expect another contribution to Omani-German friendship.” Janin’s background is in architecture and urban planning, and her art practice and process involves the discovery of beauty in local architecture from personal perspectives. As part of her residency and endeavour to engage with the locals as well as foreign residents of Oman, she is conducting a workshop titled “The Journey of Finding Beauty”. She introduces participants to the way she employs her skills to make a collective artwork, which will later be exhibited at an open studio by the end of her residency. The collective artwork will also form part of her solo exhibition as at Stal Gallery planned to open during the next season.