Exhibition – Visual Lab Rats

Installations exhibition by Alaa Abdelhamid

Opening Wednesday, June 25th 2014, from 7 pm to 10 pm, till July 16th, 2014
Daily from 10 am to 9 pm, Except Fridays
Throughout the month of Ramadan from 12 pm to 5 pm
Address: 7 Gamal El Din Abou El Mahasen St. Garden City, First Floor, Cairo

/// Visual Lab rats ///
Long after cold wars have been deployed by regimes to assure their survival, such wars have become a contemporary reference for visual and audio media. Governments utilize this process to monitor their citizens. Furthermore, citizens are lured into cooperating with these systems by means of repetition, either through recurrent images or audio messages. Such messages are stored in the minds of the public. Results of such practices are variable from one person to the other, in accordance with his/her interests and degree of awareness. Accordingly, a person follows, rejects, or alters between different interpretations of the given information. However, he/she might have to resort to the toughest choice after all, which is self-doubt.

In this project, Alaa Abdelhamid attempts to incorporate the viewer and enable cross-visibility. This quality results from the pieces acquiring liveliness, which in return, alters the visual according to the surroundings. The project stems from Abd El-Hamid’s research on the rules of reflection, and ipso facto the perceived image.