Hagar Masoud

Hagar Masoud is an interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist, scholar, and storyteller. Her research-based practice incorporates sound art, sculpture, installation, video, and technology such as artificial intelligence, and extended reality. Masoud investigates questions of gentrification, childhood trauma, and collective memory to reflect on the body and affect. She meditates on the way the body, sexuality, gender, place, trauma, and violence intersect in the aftermath of such horrors. By adopting new media and oral history as methodologies, she re-contextualizes socio-political commentary and cultural transformations.

Masoud’s work has recently been focused on the violent and oppressive practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), which refers to the practice of removing parts of the female genitalia for non-medical reasons. It is typically performed on girls between infancy and adolescence, often without their consent, and is considered a patriarchal instrument to dominate girls’ sexuality and violation of human rights. FGM is practiced in many countries across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, as well as among certain immigrant communities around the world. It is rooted in cultural beliefs surrounding femininity, purity, marriageability, and control over women’s sexuality.

Her work, Behind the Walls, is a multimedia installation and socially engaged art-based project, that aims to raise awareness about the physical and emotional pain inflicted on these girls, highlighting the urgent need to end this practice and protect the bodily autonomy of girls worldwide.

Hagar Masoud is currently pursuing her MFA in Art at SUNY Stony Brook University. She lives between Cairo and New York. She is a Fellow of Montalvo Art Center in California (2023) and Art Omi in New York (2022).

Photo by Molly Stinchfield.

Projects:

• AI.Assembly CoLAB
• Open Access: AI.Assembly