Maraya Art Center

Echoes of the Void, the new itinerant project by artist Maria Rebecca Ballestra, sponsored by the Ca 'Foscari University of Venice and curated by Rachela Abbate, arrives in the United Arab Emirates, thanks to the support and collaboration of the Maraya Art Center, which will allow the artist to create a work on the Rub Al Khali desert, or "Empty Fourth".

The Maraya Art Center is an art center founded in 2006 in Sharjah that offers an innovative program of exhibitions by both Middle Eastern and international artists, as well as hosting in its spaces a video archive, a specialized library, exhibition areas and workshop programs and educational events.www.maraya.ae

The Maraya Art Center will host Maria Rebecca Ballestra in residence from 3 to 13 December 2016, a research period in which the artist will develop a new stage of her two-year project, Echoes of the Void, confronting one of the most fascinating and mysterious landscapes on the planet. , that of the desert. The Rub Al Khali is considered the second largest sand desert in the world, still largely unexplored and practically uninhabited, covering an area of over 650,000 km2. During the residency the artist will carry out research and documentation work, and then subsequently create a corpus of works on the theme of nomadism, the “center in motion”, hospitality and the fragile balance between identity and landscape.