For the 2019 cycle of the Project Rooms, curated by Cloé Perrone, the Foundation presents three young international artists: Sophia Al-Maria, Caroline Mesquita and Rebecca Ackroyd.

None of these artists can be called a sculptress; each one uses the artistic medium within a multidisciplinary practice, expanding the definition of sculpture itself. Not treating it as a result but as a process, sculpture becomes a tool for building spatial environments of various kinds. The 2019 Project Rooms deal with issues of contemporary life and socio-cultural phenomena such as misogyny, apocalypse and national identity.

Sophia Al-Maria (1983, Tacoma - U.S.) is a Qatari-American artist, writer and filmmaker. A fan of Bai Ling’s blog since the early 2000s, Al-Maria was curious about a recurring motif in Bai’s posts referencing ‘cookie’. For a long time Sophia assumed that this ‘cookie’ was a person, perhaps a secret lover. But in fact Bai was writing positive, loving self-affirmations. The installation Mirror Cookie (2018) takes a collection of Bai’s ‘cookies’ and organizes them into a disjointed monologue referencing the self-help practice of ‘mirror work’. This slowly becomes an impassioned improvisation delivered directly to camera, as if the fourth wall she is breaking is a reflection.