Sisters Grimm to auction 50 artworks created in the UAE to mark the country's golden jubilee

The 50 for 50 sale aims to boost a new performing arts programme along with regional art initiatives

The paintings featured in the 50 for 50 auction have been created by Grammy-nominated composer Ella Spira. Sisters Grimm

Grammy-nominated composer and Sisters Grimm founder Ella Spira will be auctioning off a collection of 50 UAE landscape paintings in a bid to boost a performing arts programme along with regional art initiatives.

The auction, called 50 for 50, will mark the UAE's golden jubilee and will showcase the paintings Spira created as a result of her travels across the country.

Sisters Grimm, the Dubai production company Spira founded with ballerina Pietra De Mello-Pittman in 2009, is also dropping its first non-fungible token (NFT) artwork. The work celebrates the diversity of the seven emirates.

NFT artworks have made headlines recently after Christie's sold Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a work by artist Beeple, for a whopping $69.4 million, making it the first NFT artwork to be sold by a major auction house. NFTs are digital certificates that authenticate ownership through blockchain technology. NFTs can come in the form of drawings, music, video or other digital media, even tweets, memes, online articles or podcasts. The NFT exists on the blockchain, where it cannot be copied or manipulated.

The majority of the proceeds of both the Sisters Grimm NFT drop and the 50 for 50 art auction will go to the Pietra and Ella Theatre Production Shows UAE company, which is developing the Sisters Grimm Performing Arts Programme that aims to bolster art initiatives for youth in the region.

This is far from the first UAE-inspired project Sisters Grimm has launched.

In 2020, it released United, a song written for UAE National Day by Spira and DB Gad, featuring the vocals of Emirati singer Shamma Hamdan, Don Abdullah and Madyan Hamza. Its video has more than three million views on YouTube.

Earlier in March, the duo released a new song and music video, Windows of the Mind, featuring artworks by children across the UAE. The project came after Sisters Grimm released its "Covid-conscious" digital initiative UAE Art in Nature, giving young people aged 5 to 18 the chance to get involved with Sisters Grimm's work, and to channel their creativity while engaging with nature. It was supported by Dubai's Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA).

The self-funded project received more than 1,000 artistic submissions from more than 100 schools across the UAE, and these have been turned into 3D imagery used in the video for new single Windows of the Mind, which features the vocals of Madyan Hamza, who sings in Arabic, and DB Gad in English.