7 posts tagged “cairo”
Cairoscape - Images, Imagination and Imaginary of a Contemporary Mega City introduces the dynamic situation of contemporary art and culture in Egypt to the Berlin public.
Taking the Arab-African megalopolis of Cairo as a starting point,
Cairoscape proposes a different way of looking at the modern city and
at the phenomenon of contemporary urbanization. In the project Cairo is
held up as an emblematic place, catalyst and generator of new narrative
series that ultimately transcend local context: Cairo as translocal
place, simultaneously recipient and origin of a set of cultural
influences and ideas floating in the region, and privileged observation
point that as such may disclose unexpected yet familiar scenarios.
Cairoscape features artists and practitioners that in their work reflect a certain contemporary and existential urban condition connected to the city of Cairo, its suggestive power and urban imaginary. Works by both artists from Egypt and artists who have recently done residencies in Egypt are included, allowing differing views of Cairo to be juxtaposed. At the same time, Cairoscape examines the possibilities, the potentialities and the paradoxes of Cairo as a site of artistic production today.
A project curated by Marina Sorbello and Antje Weitze.
Townhouse Library Screenings 14 September 2008 // Library, 9:00 pm
Perfect Present Continuous Video program curated by Nat Muller
i attended a standing room only screening at the townhouse gallery downtown cairo last night curated by nat muller.
perfect present continuous brought together the work of four artists. nat introduced the series' themes of repetition, ritual, time:
“Perfect Present Continuous” is a wry reference to a grammatical tense (present perfect continuous), which indicates an unspecified time between 'before now' and 'now', wherein there is both an interest in the process as well as the result. This process may still be going on, or may just have finished. By placing the word ‘perfect’ at the beginning, an impossible – and at times ironic – utopian project is articulated. The selected works present us with visions bordering on the ideal and the flawed. They designate the moment between the potential of perfection and a preconceived failure, or the porosity between beauty and horror, present and memory, across the brink of time, geo-political space and place.
the evening started with lamia joreige's search to capture the perfect moon she saw in a starry beirut night. as nat says, the ritual of her taxi ride with video camera, the repetitive attempts to re-capture a perceived perfect moment overtakes the goal becoming itself more important. as with so much video art, i felt the digital video production and aesthetic let the piece down not quite allowing it to deliver the hypnotic transcendence it was aiming for, mirroring the captured futile attempt at capturing a live moment. nevertheless i this was the evening's strongest work.
Lamia Joreige (LB) Full Moon, 23’, 2007
The video and series of prints Full moon presents a few attempts over years to capture a poetic moment which happened once: A traveling with an extraordinary full moon while driving to Raouché crossing “the Ring”, then back home. The same traveling is repeated each time in a different way, the recordings which are each a diagnosis of our « present » in Beirut, constitute as many fragments of history. Is it possible to capture an instant? Aren’t we always beneath or beyond reality? Here, repetition becomes the reflection of a vain desire to capture beauty and at the same time a mean of renewal. It reflects on the process of creation.
jordanian / palestinian (i think) oraib toukan had a short playful ironic piece on falsified language and memory resetting. the visuals / production didn't add much to the idea.
Oraib Toukan (JO), Remind me to remember to forget, 2006, 2’50”
A short ironic narrative on language and meaning. In a split screen format, the video depicts two separate but synchronized performances. The phrase ‘remind me to remember to forget’ is written in one screen and then simultaneously snorted in another. Rhythmically set to the sound of stifled breathing, the video mocks a memory ‘made-to-forget’. The video erupted a chain of successive works that looked to falsify the language/wording of memory and our understanding of it.
then dutch artist jan de bruin had a simple one-shot take called waiting for felipe on boredom.
Jan de Bruin (NL), Waiting for Felipe, 7’, 2005
One-shot documentary film about two Italian police officers waiting for the end of their own inconvenience.
Larissa Sansour (PS/DK), SBARA, 8’30’, 2008
Heavily referencing the 1980 cult classic The Shining by Stanley Kubrick, the video piece SBARA explores the castigation of Arabs in contemporary Western dialogue. By adding an audio montage combining historical and current quotes on the Middle East to footage paraphrasing scenes from the original film, SBARA seeks to expose the cyclical nature of Middle Eastern rhetoric and policies and emphasize the psychological terror inflicted upon those at the receiving end of this repetitively stagnant political discourse.
macedonian artist yane calovski ended the night with the super art-humor piece featuring danish artist fos that didn't really leave an impression.
Yane Calovski (MK) & Fos (DK), An Early Lost Play, 2006, 11’42”
Early Lost Play is comprised of series of public actions performed by a character - a young woman, Tanja - dealing with her own indifference in the wake of the current political situation in Denmark. They are recorded on video and produced as 8 short episodes understood as interventions in the media. As the real situation evolves and progresses, the character's existential connection to reality, built upon a certain kind of social idealism, devalues and she loses the constraints as an individual submitted to accepted codes of social behaviour. The work attempts to deconstruct these existential codes and bring up and provoke issues of social morality, escapism, non-compliance and humanity. The actions performed by the character are linked to, and hint of, demystifying social ideology, through individual demonstrations against the conservative and liberal norms and standards.
a great evening (the cairo art scene feels exciting, rootsy and fresh) even though the art that attempted to deal with the place of arabs in a globalized post-911 world lacked depth and didn't seem to bring anything new to the table intellectually or emotionally.
video art more so than most art categories is mostly miss and some some really stand-out hit.
the first time i experienced a bill viola installation i was really blown away and one of my favorite pieces from my personal collection is a dark, haunting, deeply touching piece by laleh khorramian.
i have to admit the new-media / video / art i saw in beijing was super-impressive, the chinese seem to have quickly mastered the form and there are a few galleries / spaces that focus solely on the art and do it well.
nat muller is curator in-residence at townhouse for a year and i'm excited to see what she has in store.
Nat Muller (NL)
Is an independent curator and critic based in Rotterdam. She has held positions as staff curator at V2_, Institute for Unstable Media (Rotterdam) and De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics (Amsterdam). Her main interests include: the intersections of aesthetics, media and politics; (new) media and art in the Middle East. She has published articles in off- and online media; is a regular contributor for Springerin and Bidoun, and has given presentations on the subject of (new) media art (inter)nationally. Her latest projects include The Trans_European Picnic - The Art and Media of Accession (Novi Sad, 2004), DEAF_04: Affective Turbulence: The Art of Open Systems (Rotterdam, 2004); INFRA_ctures (Rotterdam, 2005), Xeno_Sonic: a series of experimental sound performances from the Middle East (Amsterdam, 2005), DEAF07 (Rotterdam, 2007), the workshop 'Between a Rock and a Hard Place? Negotiating Artistic Practice, Audiences, Representation and Collaboration within Local and International Frameworks' (Amman, 2007). She has curated video screenings for projects and festivals in a.o. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, New York, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Grimstad, Lugano, Dubai and Beirut. She recently co-edited the Mag.net Reader2: Between Paper and Pixel with Alessandro Ludovico (2007), and is working on Mag.net Reader3: Processual Publishing, Actual Gestures, based on a series of debates organized at Documenta XII. She is co-initiator of the Upgrade! Amsterdam, and has taught at the Willem de Kooning Academy (NL), ALBA (Beirut), the Lebanese American University (Beirut), and A.U.D. in Dubai (UAE). She serves as an advisor on Euro-Med collaborations for the European Cultural Foundation (ECF). This year she was a jury member for the prestigious Berlin-based media festival Transmediale. She is curator-in-residence at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo from April 2008 to April 2009.
fittingly for an egyptian boy soon moving to harlem, i just watched youssef chahine's autobiographical alexandria ... new york. surprisingly i have only seen the very average (and that's being generous) destiny by chahine and this isn't the movie to convince of chahine's supposed position as the middle east's preeminent auteur and master-filmmaker.
the film is essentially about film director yeyha's relationship with america.
the rather cumbersome plot tells two parallel stories- that of yeyha's early and formative years studying at the Pasadena Playhouse and that of yehya's son, iskander (played by the same, impressive for egyptian cinema, actor - ahmed yehia - as the young yehya) who the older director discovers and meets for the first time during a trip to New York where the NY film fest is commemorating him.
the parallels tell a tale of changing feelings for america. an innocent love for the idea of america that the young yehya embraces despite facing a bigoted and racist system evolves into a deeply disappointed cynical, crude dislike of an arrogant america that has failed to live up to its ideals (with too many unfortunate references to jews in hollywood / media etc).
the talented and successful iskander, representative of the arrogant america, rejects his arab blood when he discovers who his father is and is uninterested in learning more about his father who after repeated attempts gives up on building a relationship with his son (chahine gives up on the us).
the younger yehya is a prodigious student who overcomes america's xenophobic obstacles to win over the people if not the system. he falls in love with a beautiful classmate called ginger (yousra el-lozy in the film's best performance) who are perhaps the sexiest couple i have seen in egyptian cinema. ginger represents a youthful, giving, strong, confident and loving america. she is yehya's first love and first relationship. there's a comical, clumsy, but cute love scene between the two (egyptian cinema is still v prudish!) and it's an early love that never quite leaves the director.
the film is heartfelt, although as with almost every egyptian film i have watched, it's simplistic and heavy-handed (why do egyptian filmmakers find it necessary to clobber you repeatedly with their 'messages' and what's with all these message movies anyway?!) although ultimately chahine expresses his disappointment with america, i wouldn't situate the film alongside straight-out anti-americanism arab fare as the washington post does. it's a little more thoughtful and less reactionary than the songs of Shaaban Abdel Rahim! you sense chahine has grown exasperated with america, but as with his love for ginger, america was his first and perhaps greatest romance.
israel comes up again and again, either through the jews' claimed 'hold on hollywood' (with an especially silly clobber-scene where a jewish producer at columbia studios rejects yehya's pitch) or through violent images of palestine on the news that at one point upset yehya so much he threatens to cancel his trip to the NY film fest. this is the kind of one-sided anti-israel sentiment that disappoints me. but it's becoming clearer to me as i spend more time in egypt that the anti-srael view is well-ingrained in society. there was a short scene at yehya's NY film fest press conference where he deflects responding to a belligerent american journo by introducing three childhood friends from alexandria - a muslim, an orthodox christian and a jew who have all moved to america. a brief but longing reference to a more open, cosmopolitan egypt (more on heterodoxy soon). all quite amusing to me; my favorite arab film is an israeli production by an arab-israeli director - elia suleiman's sublime chronicle of a disappearance.
chahine's feelings about egypt, america, israel are pretty scattershot and as he nears the end of his career, that might simply reflect a genuinely hazy heart.
+ my arabic lessons cost me L.E. (Livre Egyptienne) 30 for a 2 hour lesson by a well-educated, impressive, punctual, smart, young ambitious student at ain shams university.
+ my tennis lessons cost L.E. 65 for a 45 minutes lesson by a 'coach' who's unfit, chubby, never on time and not a great tennis player.
back in cairo after over a year and my longest stay here in five, i'm proud to still not feel proud of my roots. its good to see visible signs of a growing economy and sad to see the continuous conservative religious spiral that threatens to devour the whole nation and worrying to feel the city become increasingly aggressive. hidden away in the 6th october city (which i just found out is the day egypt launched the yom kippur war) we're sheltered in a personal familial slice of paradise, at least for a couple of days.
