The Barjeel Art Foundation is pleased to launch the Barjeel Poetry Prize, an international competition that invites poets to respond to twenty works of Arab art from the 20th century.
Art and poetry have a long history of mutual inspiration; the Barjeel Poetry Prize aims to encourage fresh engagement with Arab paintings from the Barjeel collection, and to celebrate Arab art in its myriad forms by inviting poets to respond to it in two languages.
How to respond to the painting of your choice is open for interpretation. The relationship between poem and painting could be direct or tangential; you may choose to engage with the work, the painter’s story, or to address what the art evokes in you. The conversation the poem has with the painting can challenge and/or echo it.
