Vicious, tenacious, defiant, versatile … that’s how visual artist Aya Tarek has been described along the winding path that has taken her career from politically driven street art in her home city of Alexandria to launching Egypt’s first art exhibition curated for an NFT marketplace this week.
Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, are proof of ownership over a digital artwork. The ownership is proven through a secure blockchain mechanism that means that while others can view it and circulate screenshots of it, the original artwork is owned solely by the purchaser.
Who is Aya Tarek?
Although the Egyptian artist is from a traditional fine arts background that involved her spending hours on end perfecting brush strokes and colour-mixing, Tarek’s versatility – rooted in a strong urge to remain relevant – emerged early in her career. And in the 13 years since she began to capture her country’s attention, she has gone from painting – first on canvas, then murals – to digital art, 3D-motion graphics, feature films and now, NFTs.
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Though she was catapulted into the national spotlight because of her political street art produced on the sidelines of the 2011 popular uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak as Egypt’s president, Tarek’s artistic journey began a few years before that. Many Alexandrians were familiar with her graffiti as far back as 2008.
She also featured in Microphone, a 2011 political film that depicted the lives of artists and intellectuals in Egypt and the challenges they faced under Mubarak.
In the early 2010s, Tarek became fascinated with street art because of the increased visibility it offered. She wanted her work to be seen and appraised by more people than a gallery could accommodate.
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Her desire for less control over the space where art is allowed to exist was one of the main reasons Tarek…
