Medrar Projects Durational Memories: an Anti-Archive – Group Exhibition Durational Memories: an Anti-Archive – Group Exhibition

Durational Memories: an Anti-Archive – Group Exhibition

Durational Memories: an Anti-Archive – Group Exhibition

Exhibition

Goethe Institute, Downtown Cairo

18 September 2024 - 8 October 2024

Durational Memories: an Anti-Archive
Group Exhibition, Curated by Medrar for Contemporary Art

“If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
Then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.” (p. 66).
Elizabeth Bishop (1983), At the Fishhouses

Knowledge, shaped through memory and use, passes through cooking and conversation, through inherited photographs and artistic and industrial objects, through gestures, screens, and displaced bodies. Family archives, domestic materials, and digital spaces carry traces of experience. These traces circulate across local histories shaped by war, displacement, class, migration, and estrangement—histories lived privately and shared with millions of humans and non-humans.

The return to works made years ago opens questions about duration and meaning. What changes when these works are encountered again? What accumulates around them? How do they absorb personal histories alongside broader social and political shifts? The archive operates as a continuous process of remembering and reassembling. Resistance takes shape through collecting, through common culture. Personal memory intersects with collective memory, art history meets industrial history, and domestic narratives meet political struggle. As the past continues to grow, it drifts, settles, resurfaces. Meaning emerges through contact—with material and immaterial traces, with unfinished histories, and with the ongoing effort to remember.

“Durational Memories: An Anti-Archive” appears as a method of working with memory: a collection shaped through duration and proximity, through shared experience, and through what remains unresolved. Knowledge circulates between bodies, objects, images, and stories. It gathers slowly, through repetition and residue. Cultural memory forms through what is carried forward and what slips away.

Set in an enigmatic virtual reality, Amr Ali’s Nowhere explores the disorienting boundaries between reality and illusion. The participant is immersed in a barren, cyclical landscape where every path leads back to the beginning, prompting reflection on existence.

Marwa Benhalim’s Nile Perch returns to archival footage of her father’s 2003 trip to Sudan, later discovered and reworked alongside imagery from Teletubbies, narrated by a young girl. Personal memory merges with mediated fantasy, opening questions around labor, globalization, and historical narration.

In Studio Dunia, Marguerite Farag begins a digital investigation sparked by a photograph found at a Friday flea market in Cairo. Through contemporary tools, she traces fragmented histories and reflects on how technology reshapes access to the past.

Nadia Ghanem’s Three Disappearances And A Song revisits her family archive through intertwined stories of her grandfather, mother, and father. Emotional and physical disappearances unfold alongside political histories, forming a layered meditation on loss and identity.

Huda Lutfi’s Gestures, developed from the 2011–2012 Egyptian revolution, draws from her Cut and Paste series. Using collage, she maps public emotions and symbols into a psychogeographic archive of collective experience during social upheaval.

Diesel Mekhtigian addresses Armenian-Egyptian cultural preservation through an imagined exhibition narrated by two women. Photographs animate voices from within a shrinking community, articulating tensions between heritage and survival.

Larissa Sansour’s Soup Over Bethlehem situates food as a site of political and cultural negotiation. A family dinner opens into broader reflections on Palestinian identity, showing how everyday rituals carry national histories.

Rania Stephan’s MEMORIES FOR A PRIVATE EYE #1 navigates personal loss through cinema, private archives, and digital media, constructing a spiraling investigation around her deceased mother and the instability of images over time.

Yasmine’s A Cup of Tea with Fathy Mahmoud unfolds from an incidental encounter: drinking tea from a cup signed by the late sculptor. From this small gesture emerges a long-term investigation into Mahmoud’s artistic legacy, monumental production, and Egypt’s industrial history. The project moves between personal memory and national narratives, tracing how artistic practice intersects with manufacturing, political economy, and everyday objects. Tea becomes an entry point into layered histories of making, circulation, and cultural inheritance.

Saif’s 1991 centers on a FaceTime conversation between the filmmaker and his mother, separated by borders and unresolved immigration status. The film weaves together domestic routines in a remote cabin, virtual communication, and memories of the Gulf War, including his mother’s recollection of giving birth amid conflict. Through this fragmented structure, 1991 reflects on distance and displacement, and on how relationships persist across mediated space, where memory circulates between bodies, screens, and landscapes.

Curated by Raneem Elhaddad, Durational Memories: An Anti-Archive brings together a selection of works drawn from over a decade of Medrar for Contemporary Art’s archive, presented as part of Goethe Film Week 2024.

Opening: Tuesday 17 September, 7 PM. The exhibition is open daily from 4pm to 10pm

Address: Goethe Institute, 5 Al Bustan St, Downtown, Cairo

Exhibiting Artists:

Durational Memories: An Anti-Archive is part of Goethe Film Week 2024, featuring a selection of works by Egyptian and Arab artists, drawn from over a decade of Medrar’s extensive archive.

Amr Ali

Nowhere, VR (2023)
Nowhere is a VR experience that explores the nature of reality and illusion. The player finds themselves in an unfamiliar, empty landscape with no clear path forward. They must make decisions that will determine their path, but no matter what they choose, they always seem to end up back in the same place.
As the player progresses, they begin to question the nature of reality itself. Are they really in a physical world, or are they trapped in a mirage? Is there any way to escape the illusion?
In the end, the player must determine for themselves what is real and what is an illusion. However, one thing is certain: Nowhere is a journey that will challenge your perception of reality.
”Nowhere” was produced as a part of the MedRX Production Workshop (Extended Ecologies), 2023 by Medrar.

Dessil Mekhtigian

From the work of the devil, Video (2021)
After being away for ten years, Dessil returns to Cairo to organize an exhibition on the pioneering Armenian photographers who documented Egypt through time. Her attempt to continue their legacy and keep the culture alive unfolds as she traverses Cairo, gathering content from those who now hold this heritage. Throughout this journey, she faces the community’s skepticism toward her intentions and the reasons behind the exhibition – ‘We aren’t shrinking; we are still here.’ As we explore this imaginary exhibition, the photos come to life, and we hear their voices. On this imagined journey, two women seek to find their place in today’s Egypt.
“From the work of the devil” was produced as a part of the Motion of the Images Production Workshop, 2021 by Medrar.

Huda Lutfi

“Gestures” (2013 – 2014)
During the 2011-2012 protests, Lutfi pursued an archival practice of collecting information from the internet, where characters from Egyptian films were frequently used to comment on social, cultural, and political issues. As part of her series titled “Cut and Paste,” which reflects the material process of creating collages, Huda seeks to present a psychogeographic archive of the emotions, gestures, figures of speech, and images that circulated in public spaces during Egypt’s transitional period. These items attempt to serve as her personal archive of that time, coming together to create an impressionistic story of the recent past.
 “Gestures” is part of Cut and Paste Exhibition that was documented by Medrar TV in 2014.
“Gestures” by Huda Lutfi (2013-2014) represented by TINTERA

Larissa Sansour

Soup Over Bethlehem, a Video, 2006
Soup Over Bethlehem depicts an ordinary Palestinian family, Sansour’s own, around a dinner table on a rooftop overlooking the West Bank city of Bethlehem. What starts as a culinary discussion about the national dish ‘mloukhieh’ soon evolves into a personal and engaging conversation about politics – thereby emphasizing the symbiosis of food and politics so indicative of the Palestinian experience.
 “Molokhia” traces back to the Cairo Video Festival’s archive in its second edition in 2007.

Marguerite Farag

Studio Dunia, a Video (2016)
After finding an intriguing photograph in the Friday Flea Market, the filmmaker sets on learning more about the picture the only way she knows how: Google.
“Studio Dunia” was produced in «Rethinking Poor Images» workshop, 2016 by Medrar; a video art and experimental film production workshop that took place over the course of nearly one month the workshop in which participants met for 12 sessions six Egyptian artists explored video art production through a different perspective, with looking at the found footage and poor images.

Marwa Benhalim

Nile Perch, Video (2016)
In 2003 Benhalim’s father went on a business trip to Sudan, the artist was only 11 at the time. Retold to her in bedtime stories, moving between utopic reiteration of reality and a childish spin. In 2016 she found footage taken by her father on the trip, her first real visual understanding of the now mystical journey. Nile Perch is a re-imagination of the trip through the integration of the original footage with the Teletubies’ landscape, stitched together with the voice of a young girl narrating the story as if it were her own. The intertwines memory and reality while discussing labor, globalization and capital.
“Nile Perch” was produced in «Rethinking Poor Images» workshop, 2016 by Medrar; a video art and experimental film production workshop that took place over the course of nearly one month the workshop in which participants met for 12 sessions six Egyptian artists explored video art production through a different perspective, with looking at the found footage and poor images.

Nadia Ghanem

Three Disappearances And A Song, Video (2021)

As my grandfather’s presence in the country becomes increasingly problematic, my mother gradually decides to never touch a camera again, my father becomes obsessively convinced of his own disappearance, and something almost miraculous happens in 1976 in Montreux: Nina Simone comes back from retirement.
In Three Disappearances and a Song, I revisit the family archive, pick up my camera, and film 3 people struggling to find new ways to be: my mother, my father, and myself.

Rania Stephan

MEMORIES FOR A PRIVATE EYE #1, Video (2015)
MEMORIES FOR A PRIVATE EYE is the first chapter in a trilogy which investigates the filmmaker’s personal archive. Evoking the language of film noir, it foregrounds the fictional detective Marc McPhearson from the film “Laura” by Otto Preminger (1943), to help unfold deep and traumatic memories. The film spirals around a lost image: the only moving image of the filmmaker’s dead mother. How is absence lived? What remains of war, death and love with the passing of time? These are the questions that are delicately displayed for contemplation.

While dwelling onto the past, the film weaves together images from different sources – private archive, cinema, television, you-tube- unfolding into a labyrinthic maze, to create a blueprint of remembrance itself.

Saif Alsaegh

1991, a Video (2018)
“1991” is a documentary film revolving around a conversation between the filmmaker, an Iraqi asylum-seeker living in the U.S., and his mother Bushra Alsaegh, an Iraqi immigrant living in Turkey waiting for approval to immigrate to the U.S. Both are in uncertain positions regarding their immigration statuses and haven’t been able to see each other for years. 1991 navigates the distance between them. Through a Facetime call, the film expresses the ways that a relationship becomes virtual and symbolic across forced distances. 1991 is set in a cabin where the filmmaker lives a semi-imaginary, peaceful life, building fires, cooking, and dancing. The central phone conversation details Bushra’s memory of the filmmaker’s birth in the middle of the 1991 Gulf War, and the danger and suffering she went through, through poetic juxtaposition of the virtual landscape of the phone, the calm landscape of the cabin, and the chaotic landscape of memory…
Durational Memories: An Anti-Archive is part of Goethe Film Week 2024, featuring works by ten artists, drawn from over a decade of Medrar’s archive. “1991” traces back to the Cairo Video Festival’s archive in its ninth edition in 2019.

Yasmine El Meleegy

A Cup of Tea with Fathy Mahmoud, a Multimedia Installation, 2019 – ongoing
“A Cup of Tea with Fathy Mahmoud” is a long-term project and published book that engages with the legacy of the late Egyptian sculptor Fathy Mahmoud. The project began unexpectedly with a simple moment—drinking tea from a cup signed by him. It explores Mahmoud’s personal narrative, monumental artistic works, and industrial impact, tracing the political and economic history of Egypt’s industrial awakening.
El Meleegy positions industrial porcelain molds as possible symbols of both the reparation of personal objects and broader societal reform, examining the intersections between objects and their histories—a cup of tea and a national narrative.