Exhibition Cairo
Cairo: Fabric of the Everyday
Participating artists: Lara Baladi, Huda Lutfi, Maha Maamoun, Nourhan Maayouf, Agnes Michalczyk, Mena El Shazly, and Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber
Experiencing Cairo reveals a prodigious cultural, religious, and architectural diversity that creates a multi-layered everyday life. Entangled in rapid development and urban restructuring, these daily practices continually produce social spaces and extend into public spheres. Underlining these urban conditions, the works in “Cairo: Fabric of the Everyday” center the notion of the often neglected experience of the everyday and its spatial imagination. Photographic-, video-, and sculptural works and spatial installations explore the changes in the texture and fabric of the city and, from an artistic perspective, seek the potentials of everyday life to generate and sustain the complex yet livable fabric of contemporary Cairo.
Organized and curated by artists Huda Lutfi and Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, the exhibition was realized in collaboration with the Austrian Cultural Forum Cairo and the international project “Imagine Climate Dignity,” initiated by the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Ciaro in Novermber 2024.
Lara Baladi: Oum El Dounia, wallpaper 2024
Lara Baladi is an Egyptian Lebanese artist, archivist, writer and educator, recognized internationally for her multidisciplinary works. Her artistic practice spans from photography, video, sculpture, architecture to multi-media installations. Informed by critical investigations into historical archives and the study of popular visual culture, Baladi’s work questions the theoretical divide between myth, memory, socio-political narratives and the cycles inherent to History. From 2016 to 2022, Lara Baladi has been a Lecturer in MIT’s Program Art, Culture, and Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). She currently serves a Professor of Practice in the Visual Arts Program, at the Department of Arts at The American University in Cairo.
Nourhan Maayouf: Emad El Gedid, 2024 (This project is the outcome of Medina art residency program, Cairo, 2024)
Nourhan Maayouf is an Egyptian artist who works with photography, video, and installations. Her work engages with the recent urban transformations in Cairo, exploring how the relationship between humans
and nature, as well as collective memory, undergoes processes of destabilization. In her projects she illustrates how human resilience and adaptability creatively seek material ways to reclaim the right to the city. In 2022, she earned her MA in Arts in Public Spheres from the Valais School of Art (EDHEA) in Switzerland. Additionally, in 2016, she received the Absa Bank l’Atelier Grand Award in South Africa.
Maha Maamoun: Shooting Stars Remind Me of Eavesdroppers, video 4 min, 2013
Maha Maamoun is an artist, curator and publisher living and working in Cairo. Her work examines the form, function and currency of popular visual and literary images as an entry point to investigating the cultural fabric that we weave and are woven into. She is a co-founder of the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), an arts and culture space founded in Cairo in 2004, and of Kayfa ta, a publishing and curatorial initiative founded in 2012.
Mena El Shazly: Naming of Parts: Y Control, plaster, metal, silicone, embroidery, various sizes, 2019
Mena El Shazly is a visual artist whose work is grounded in time-based media. Her practice speculates on concepts of presence and transcendence as informed by the internet culture and ancient rituals, and explores practices of cultivating decay to arrive at alternative forms of transformation and regeneration. El Shazly also has a well-established curatorial practice. She is the Artistic Director of the Cairo Video Festival organized by Medrar and a programmer at the Small File Media Festival.
Agnes Michalczyk: metro, wallpaper and graphic novel, 2024
Agnes Michalczyk is a visual artist and educator living and working between Cairo and Europe. Graduated from Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig she currently teaches at the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Arts at the German University in Cairo. Her work is exploring the urban space of Cairo through a female perspective focusing on the city and its narratives, real or imagined. She works in a variety of media, painting, drawing and collage, between 2012-2016 focusing on Street Art and since 2014 increasingly working in digital media, contributing to different art projects in Cairo and abroad.
Huda Lutfi: Colonial Effects: the salon, textile, 2024. Cairo Resonances, video 3 min, 2013
Huda Lutfi’s practice has been sensitive to her surrounding social and cultural climate. Moving between metaphorical and literal visualizations, her work is playful, subversive and at times equally as harsh as the conditions it reacts to. The artist re-appropriates discarded objects, elements from a boisterous street culture, and political allusions into her particular narratives. In parallel to her interest in materiality, a continuous meditative undercurrent is equally present throughout her work, which is inspired by both her academic and personal interest in sufi spiritual practices and existential questions. A historian by training, Huda Lutfi is a self-taught artist based in Cairo. A former Associate Professor at the American University in Cairo, Huda holds a PhD in Islamic Culture and History from McGill University in Montreal.
Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber: Squaring the Circle (Lazughli), wood, Jaquard textile, 2024; Squaring the Circle (Talaat Harb), wallpaper 2024.
Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, Vancouver- and Vienna-based artists, collaborate on projects addressing the politics of how cities, architecture and urban territories are made into images. Mainly working in the media of photography and spatial installations, their research-oriented practice engages with specific moments and logics of the global-urban change as they take shape in neighborhoods, architecture, and everyday life. Their ongoing research includes projects such as “Educational Modernism,” “Performing Spaces of Radical Pedagogies”, and “Housing the Social.” Sabine Bitter is a professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.
Huda Lutfi and Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber: Shifting Perspectives: Al-Khawarizmi’s Nile Map, textile, embroidery, 2024.
Here you find more informatiom on this map.