Art
Behind the Party Aesthetics
With the weather as cool as it’s been lately, chances are you’ve been to one of the great concept parties around the kingdom, like the Beetlejuice-themed Halloween party at Mezzaluna or Farm Fest last weekend. One of most discussed elements of the parties is the elaborate and customized layouts created specifically for each event, from physical structures to animated projections. The guys behind the artistic setups that add visual oomph to the party go by the name of Vuruz Vision.
I got a chance to get the scoop from the Vuruz Vision men themselves, Hisham T and Adbul. The first thing I was wondering, of course, is how this entire project got started. “We actually met at the Eclipse Festival at Dar Islands in October of last year. When we met, we were both shooting videos at the event, and during the week of the festival, we just saw that we clicked! We had a lot of the same ideas, got into the technicalities, and basically had a lot of geeky mutual interests. Things just kind of took off from there, we started collaborating and saw that we were always in sync, in terms of our ideas, our workflows, creating visuals, etc.” It was their first joint gig for Boho Baha that sealed the deal; after being asked to do projection mapping together for La Machine Cosmique, the attendees and organizers were blown away by the scale and creativity of the boys’ joint venture. “That’s when Khalil Rasool (Boho Baha organizer) walked up to us and said, ‘you guys need a name!’ We decided to get into it, and after a lot of brainstorming and ideas, we thought, ‘Vuruz’: Visual Gurus, since we work with so many visuals and all kinds of digital art.”
The duo would start off creating their own images, from shooting clips to creating timelapses and morphing them into visuals. “Everything was experimental; we tinkered and messed around with different equipment and artistic concepts to see what we could come up with.” After traveling to Morocco to film a documentary for the Ministry of Culture, Hisham and Adbul came back to Bahrain with full force as Vuruz Vision, taking parts in different events and receiving excited feedback for every set up. “Fast forward to today, and we’re working on all kinds of events, from art galleries to big parties!”
So what’s the next step for the thriving visual venture? “Our next step is definitely collaborating with more artists, and of course, getting more people! The amount of projects we’re working on definitely takes more than the two of us, and each project requires people from different backgrounds, because every concept we work on is uniquely customized.” The gurus note that they’re working to establish a creative working environment to get more people on board, “we don’t want people to think of it as just a ‘job,’ we want everyone to be as comfortable as possible in the workspace and to do what they love.” This ranges from animation, to all types of digital art, to carpentry.
“We also want to give back to the society, from holding workshops and teaching people what we know to projection mapping street art! It’s a way for us to pay back the country, because it’s more than just business, we want to make a change.” The boys note the importance of proactivity and their openness to all kinds of projects and collaborations that could help incite that change. “We’re more than a creative agency, more than a business, we’re a group of visual artists who love what we do and want to impact the community positively with our work.”