ARTIST BIO

Sara-Maya is a spoken word artist and practitioner from Calgary, Alberta. She is also a dancer and has trained in a variety of styles including Bharatnatyam, Bollywood, Contemporary, Salsa, Bachata and Ballet. Sara-Maya is passionate about fusing different cultures, lifestyles and languages into her practice as well as mixing media. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in International Development, and her Bachelor of Education, specializing in Artistic Community Education. She has worked over the last several months to develop programs in collaboration with Ontario-based NGOs to allow newcomers to Canada to use the arts as a tool of connection, resettlement, and integration into a community. In 2020, she wrote and directed a spoken word production involving six artists about gun violence and Islamophobia, and has since then performed at several venues. Most recently, her Tedx talk at theTedxQueensU conference titled, "What does Islam say? (Spoiler: Nothing)" also incorporated a spoken-word poetry segment. Sara-Maya is currently teaching adult Bollywood classes at the Kingston School of Dance and has been a guest instructor for Blissful Dance, in which she developed Bollywood dance classes for individuals with disabilities and limited mobility, as well as developed and taught a dance programme called "Storytelling Through Movement" for an international youth leadership summit.

https://saramayakaba.wixsite.com/artist-portfolio

ARTWORK DESCRIPTION

Sara-Maya's piece asks the audience to ponder the notion of what a picture would tell us if we listened to the perspectives that it embodies. She explores the different facets of the human experience captured in images, and raises questions to whether pictures in today’s time tell stories in the same way that pictures of the past have. Her creation is inspired by the themes of “values and ideals”, as Sara-Maya sees art as a tool for empathy, education, dialogue and hope, as well as “identity and self”, as her identity as a Canadian-Pakistani Muslim and a “seeker of light” is often shown through her art. The beginning of the piece illustrates how pictures in all their forms confront us with the realities of human nature, and conveys stark contrasts between different conditions of existence. From there, she explores how the super-saturation of images – typically of ourselves – contributes to a climate of looking but no longer seeing the stories behind the pictures. Sara-Maya asks us to consider how we can learn to look at images as story-tellers, and urges us to re-learn how to journey through the web of insights that they offer us.