Shift Lab contest winners focus on emerging artists

Two online community initiatives are set to give grass-roots arts and culture groups a boost by promoting their content and events for free. The project will focus on creating online and offline campaigns to increase the audience for artists and independent organisations that would otherwise not have the financial means and reach to get the word out.

Street Nights. Courtesy of Dubai Food Festival

Two online community initiatives are set to give grass-roots arts and culture groups a boost by promoting their content and events for free.

As part of the British Council’s inaugural Culture Shift Lab competition last month, residents, artists and entrepreneurs were invited to work on innovative digital ideas to address a community issue.

Two projects – Creative Dubai and Culturescape – jointly won this year’s event.

Creative Dubai is an online portal being developed by Alex Teodoresco, the co-founder of Street Nights in Dubai; Hetal Pawani, the founder of thejamjar and Artinthecity; Dubai-based artist Wael Hattar; and digital media expert Mel Songoo.

The project will focus on creating online and offline campaigns to increase the audience for artists and independent organisations that would otherwise not have the financial means and reach to get the word out.

“The issue here is how do these initiatives get noticed and get above all the noise of the big events,” says Teodoresco.

“We need to create that voice in an industry that is highly fragmented. We want to offer resources, free of charge, to people who want to grow in the cultural world and create their brand.”

Still in the early stages, the team is working to attract the creative community, established artists and relevant stakeholders in the government sector to get involved in the project, after which they will seek corporate collaboration to back their campaigns through the website.

“We want to create a space that can take care of the little guys and get people talking about Dubai as an artistic city,” says Teodoresco.

Culturescape is a listings website (www.culturescape.co) set up to highlight events by artists who are just gaining a foothold in the industry. Dubai-based Hussam Mohsineh, a software engineer who joined entrepreneur Mehrad Yaghmai to come up with the idea, says residents need to be exposed to all sorts of events and not just the international acts that come to Dubai.

“The way this will work is that once an artist posts an event on our website, they need to take the effort to promote it in their friend circle, inviting them to like the event,” says Mohsineh.

“Once they manage to find 20 people to like it on our website, the event will go live and we will step in to promote it and garner more interest.

“This way their popularity will grow organically.”