"What is Mengutas?"
Mengutas is an Uyghur-led community arts collective and networking initiative dedicated to preserving and sharing Uyghur culture through the arts. We also seek to discover and host Uyghur artists living all around the world, as well as funding and hosting events to showcase these artists.

How It Works
Mengutas' main focus is networking for Uyghur creatives and will feature creative work from these individuals around the world as collaborators.
These artists are considered our members.Mengutas will never claim ownership over member artists’ work. Artists retain full rights to their creations. Artists can also choose if they want their work removed whenever they want.

The end goal is for this to be a self-sustaining project. Money will be raised through fundraisers and sales, and those funds will be used for actual projects, such as galleries, exhibitions, etc.Thse project ideas will come from you, the community! Which projects are funded will be decided by both members and council through a vote, however other ideas will never be discarded.

Although our main focus is to preserve Uyghur culture and host Uyghur artists, we do have a few guidelines we ask the community to follow.In general, we ask for respect to be shown to one another when interacting within this space.
While we recognize, and encourage, that art be used as a political tool, Mengutas does not platform content that promotes division within the community or attacks individuals or groups based on their identity or personal beliefs.As Mengutas is built upon unity and collective effort, division will only weaken our efforts, and as we refrain from bringing personal differences into this space, we only ask the same of you.

For artists, we have a strict anti-AI policy.
Mengutas prioritizes human-created work.
Looking past the ethical reasonings for this decision, AI cannot accurately represent Uyghur culture, and it plagarizes pre-existing work, thus we will not be accepting work that is suspected to have been created using generative AI, whether in part or full.Similarly, artists must submit only work they have the rights to share. Plagiarism and unauthorized use of other people's work will not be tolerated.Mengutas assures careful screening of all potentional collaborators. In order to protect our community and mission, Mengutas reserves the right to decline or remove any content that does not align with our principles, or breaks any of our rules, even after initial screening.

We are currently building our artist network...
YOU could become a member! If you are an Uyghur creative and want to collaborate, please contact us on Instagram!

(We also plan to look at Uyghur art history, and invite anyone interested this to also reach out.)