Bint Al-Shalabiya is an interdisciplinary folk artist, witch-mage and experimental musician interested in the juxtaposition of the sacred and profane. Bint explores contemporary applications of traditional esoteric + cultural technologies – using sound, performance and folk art.

Across all mediums, her work heavily incorporates motifs, methods and materia informed by early childhood training in Islamic art as well as her Egyptian, South Asian and Moorish ancestries.  She occasionally presents, speaks and teaches on subjects of Islamic metaphysics. While her current focus weighs heavier on practices of Islamic folk magic, her background as an Initiate is deeply grounded in western ceremonial magick, sufism, hermetic qabalah and thelema. Select recent lectures and workshops and links could be found on the NEWS page or listed in CV below. 

As a visual artist, Bint works across many mediums and is deeply influenced by her training since childhood in traditional Islamic art, which the artist still continues to study abroad (Turkey, Palestine, Spain, Israel, Egypt). It is common for many pieces to end up in the third dimension, inspired by her early work in Hollywood costuming and prop design.

As a performance artist, she is interested in work that involves, challenges and provokes the audience out of the passive emotional state default to viewership– as historically demonstrated by the Futurists, Actionists and various radical Sufi sects (e.g. Qalandaris). With an early background in fringe and street art circles, the artist still tends to prefer street-style performance and public rituals as a method of confronting and interacting with audiences. Her choices of movement and choreography are deeply rooted in over a decade as a trained dancer.

Her visual and performance art has been featured in galleries and stages around the US, most notably for Black Sabbath, Coachella Music & Arts Festival, the Electric Daisy Carnival and at the Manly P Hall Institute of Philosophical Research.