The New York Arab Festival, in partnership with the historic East Village theater La Mama, are proud to present a series of digital art and video-performances exhibited from April 30th through May 8th. The exhibition explores the intersection of digital art with performance and performativity. It showcases the work of Ahmed El Shaer, Mey Seifan, Ichraq Bouzidi, and Fadl Fakhouri. Tucked into the theatre’s lobby, this exhibition offers a glimpse into the rich world of digital art by contemporary Arab artists, living in New York and beyond.

In this series of works comprising several images and animated short loops, Ahmed El Shaer collaborates with Artificial Intelligence to explore questions on the afterlife, and how a machine imagines the metaphysical and the transcendental. All images produced through generative technologies, the final artistic works are fully created by machine intelligence, without the artist’s interference. A radical experiment in what Islamic Art could look like in the 21st century, away from stereotypical expectations and orientalist images. ‘AI Heaven’ is alluring, and terrifying. The images play with our perception, unsettling our expectation of form and meaning, as we stare into these works, created by a nonhuman agent.