PhotoCairo is a strong collection of Photography, film, installations and video centering on the notion of contemporary realities in cities, particularly Cairo.
The current fourth edition is a month-long exhibition, spanning four venues and featuring two symposiums taking place over a series of five days. The exhibition has been two years in the making, and is curated by Edit Molnar and Aleya Hamza, resident curators at the Cairo Image Collective.
The venues involved are the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo Image Collective, Hungarian Institute, and an apartment on Sherif Street in Downtown Cairo. I attended two of the four openings, at the Townhouse Gallery and CIC, which took place simultaneously Wednesday evening.
The exhibition, Molnar and Hamza explained, was born of a shared history of “consuming art together, including experiences that provided a sense of “what not to do. They also encountered a number of artists abroad, including Polish artist Artur Zmijewski for example, whose work they highly admired upon seeing it at the German-based international exhibition of modern and contemporary art Documenta XII.
The origins of this edition, entitled “The Long Short Cut, came from “Tales from around the Pavement, a smaller CIC project. “‘Tales from around the Pavement’ was tackling the notion of how people use public spaces. said Molnar. “Our claim was that there are actually no public spaces in Cairo, in the Habermasian way, so it is more or less a battlefield.
For PhotoCairo, “It was important to shape a set of questions and interests of how we would imagine a show to touch on certain questions of daily reality. We are absolutely fascinated by artists who can talk about basic questions through the language of art and who also feel engaged with their contemporary reality, continued Molnar. This notion of “contemporariness is of prime importance.
In creating the exhibition the curators sought a non-didactic approach. “We didn’t want to use big words like ‘Informal Housing’ and ‘Informal Economy’, said Aleya Hamza. “There are a lot of other words that deal with these conditions and how they affect you as an individual living in these conditions. So they’re a bit more introverted, a bit more poetic. They don’t deal with the conceptual framework in a very direct way.
The exhibit concentrated its fundraising efforts on raising money to commission new works from artists. The two were weary of traditional modes of curation. “We had no curatorial thesis, and did not seek to match artists who dealt with our thesis question, said Molnar.
Similarly, the curators avoided a precise theme for the works. Like Spanish international curator Marti Peran’s work, a speaker in the forthcoming symposium, theirs represents post-modern wave that is essentially collaborative.
PhotoCairo, say Hamza and Molnar, is based on close dialogue with the participating artists, in some cases on a weekly basis. Another curatorial thread of the work relates to innovative use of exhibition spaces.
The Factory Space at the Townhouse Gallery provides a good example. A massive room, that was once a paper factory, has been physically transformed with more individual and intimate viewing spaces. “It is very difficult to have a group exhibition there, because it gets lost in the space, said Hamza. So the pair worked Egyptian architect Marwan Fayed to create a classical white cube.
“We were looking to problematize, or question, the notion of spaces, said Molnar. In so doing, the team sought spaces like the apartment on Sherif Street – bereft of past exhibition history.
“If you have a space, said Hamza, “where you are used to seeing single channel video installations, the space becomes this montage of single channel video installations and the work doesn’t really have an impact on you. It becomes diluted somehow. The apartment, she insists, “forces people to see the work, to engage with it.
The venues, added Hamza, are not defined by theme. Rather, works have been assigned to the venues which best serve them.
The works themselves comment on questions of authorship and employ experimental strategies to address their subject matter. Notable works from the exhibit include young video artist Mohammed Allam’s “A Stream of Holy Words at the Townhouse Gallery, a wonderfully ironic single channel video featuring a young man, whose upper head has been edited off, rendering his mouth in focus, for a wild, occasionally lucid rant.
The videos of Raed Yassin in the Townhouse Space and Maha Maamoon in CIC are taken from old Egyptian films. Maamoon’s highly clever film “Domestic Tourism features a stream of movie scenes shot in front of the Pyramids. Artist Bernard Guillot has a wonderfully eccentric collection of appropriated objects, including a record of Elvis Presley’s first and only press conference, and a facsimile of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These represent only a sampling of a host of powerful works on view.
The exhibition runs from Dec. 17 to Jan. 14 in four different venues and features discussions with artists and curators that take place from Dec. 19 to 21 and on Jan. 9 and 10.
