THE MOVING POSTER

Opening Wednesday, 27th February 2019 7 pm
Open daily from 3 to 9 pm. Closed Fridays.

‘The Moving Poster’, the first exhibition of animated posters in Cairo, brings together top designers and animators from all over the world. ‘Moving posters’ are a new digital form where the visual content is animated and displayed through an array of moving image technologies. The exhibited selection demonstrates the wide range of possibilities as well as the limitations of digital visuals and raises questions like: What new techniques and methods of narration can be employed? What are the defining lines between an animated poster and a film? How can this medium develop in the future? And, most importantly, what is a poster exactly?

‘The Moving Poster’ was previously shown at the Weltformat Graphic Design Festival, Switzerland – 2016 and in Typomania international Typographic Festival, Russia – 2017.

The exhibition is accompanied by 3 guest lectures and a two-day workshop.

<< Posters in Process>>
Erich Brechbühl will give an in-depth introduction to his poster design process and show some of his other recent works. By sharing different examples of his work with the public, he will demonstrate the paths and experiments he goes through to reach the final design.

<< I Like to move it>>
Josh Schaub will talk about why and how he believes everyone should animate their visual works. In his talk, Schaub will discuss the various different elements involved in working with moving posters and animated infographics including dynamic fonts and kinetic illustrations amongst other elements.
Following a brief presentation of their work, Turbo, together with the guest speakers, invites the audience to an open informal discussion around regional and international contemporary design discourses and their relation to the visual arts.

http://www.themovingposter.com


The closure Roznama 6 – studio program in collaboration with D-Caf

We invite you to a week of events with the public in the closer of Roznama 6 program, after seven months of meetings, discussions, work, and collective thinking, through the frameworks of fellowship, and partnership.

Roznama 6 Studio program imagines an educational and social space. At its first edition, nine participants joined the program which relied on several intersecting paths, addressing the location of artists and in their surroundings related to language and material, history, authority, and concepts of work. Through these pathways, we have worked to extract concepts such as beauty, authenticity, and fatigue from their familiar contexts, and to reshape them within the artistic contexts of the process. Over the past months from March to August, the participants engaged in workshops and work groups that extend the length of the program, in addition to individual meetings with external consultants. The program’s structure constitutes two sessions of collective criticism that meet and demonstrate the program’s trajectories and implications, during which fellows presented projects developed during their time.

These events are held at the end of the term and open the discussion to a more diverse audience, where we bring back the ideas and discussions that inspired us during the program period.

We would be delighted if you could join us for our six nights of self-reflection and discussion.

// Fellows of Roznama 6 Studio of the year 2018//

Esraa Elfeki, Engy Mohsen, Aya Elsayed, Shadwa Ali. Mohamed Esmail Shawki, Marwan Elgamal. Mariam Hamdi, Hadia Mahmoud, and Hend Moaz.

// 2018 Program designed by //

Ahmed Elbadry, Mohamed Abdelkarim, and Nour Elsafoury

// Program Coordinator //

Nada Fathy

Rosnama 6 Studio Program in collaboration with D-Caf is an initiative of Medrar for Contemporary Art under the framework of D-Caf Festival’s Visual Arts Program at its seventh edition. This program would not have been possible without the invitation and cooperation of the D-Caf Festival to hold and implement it. We would also like to thank gallery Gypsum and Ismailia Real Estate Investment Company for their continued support of Roznama.

Thanks to all the fellows and consultants who contributed to Roznama 6

The schedule:

Monday – September 24:

// From 7 to 7:30 PM// Snippets of the expert fellows of Roznama//

// from 8 – 10 PM//: open discussion about education and learning in art through Roznama 6 publication which will be distributed before the closure and will be available in the studios during the week.

// from 10 – 11 PM //: Internal Broadcast: 

Audio broadcasts that include songs, poetry, recordings, and discussions nominated by Roznama 6 fellows. 

Tuesday – September 25:

// From 6 – 7:30 PM// Open discussion with the audience //

Starting with Aya Elsayed. Esraa Elfekki, and Hend Moaz. Aya worked on a project that merges interest in educational pedagogies in artistic spaces with photography’s relationship to memory and our personal archive. Esraa began her project of genocide research and developed it to contain a study into the aesthetics of speeches that merge political power with conspiracy. Hend views the intersection between art and torture through concepts borrowed from historical narratives. As a start to the discussion, part of these projects will be publicly available.

Wednesday – 26 September //Off//

Thursday – 27 September:

//From 6 – 7 PM// Open discussions with the Audience: with Marwan El Gamal and Shadwa Ali. Marwan talks to us about his project in which he uses visual and audio language that he has developed throughout his previous projects and about the kind of experience that the audience aspires to have. You will be able to watch an installation that was made by Marwan during the program. Shadwa then takes us on a sound trip in her studio through her project in which she uses a sound medium and recorded metro materials.

//From 7, 30 M-9// Discussion with Nour Emam: In this discussion, Nour will tell us about her project “Islam in the 21st Century: Inserting Electronic Music into the Rituals of the Sufi circles”, which she had worked on for two years. It shows us her experience of inserting electronic music as part of religious ritual circles and its impact on participants’ experiences. Questions were also raised about the location of the ethnologist during the fieldwork and the artist’s ownership of the work she carried out within the framework of those circles. Nour Emam ran a workshop in July with the fellows of Roznama 6 on the history of sound practices.

Friday – 28 September:

// From 6 – 7:30 PM // Open discussion with the audience: with Engy Mohsen, Mariam Hamdi, and Hadia Mahmoud. Engy is interested in social artistic practices. She will talk about her project “The Act of Conversing in a Space that Remembers” and interacting with an audience through a performance artwork. Mariam is interested in the medium of photography and is concerned with the relationship between social media platforms and predecessor images. Hadia works on her project with rubber and we will talk about her relationship with material and the concepts of beauty and ugliness. They will present their work in the studio space to start the discussion.

// From 8 – 9 PM // About the collective work: Fellows present their experiences of collective work through diverse projects they have undertaken during the program, along with some proposals related to the concept of collective work, policies, and tools. The discussion is moderated by Mohammed Abdul Karim.

Saturday – 29 September:

// From 6 – 6:30 PM // Open discussion with the audience: with Mohamed Esmail Shawki who will talk about the project that he made during the program and the action steps to work in public spaces.

// From 6 – 6:30 PM // About the artist, institution, and sustainability: A discussion on the economic relationship between artists and institutions, presented by the fellows through the presentation of materials from field research they carried out during the program period. We see this debate as a necessary complement to field research and an opportunity to initiate a dialogue involving art institutions for a more sustainable space. The discussion is moderated by Mohammed Abdul Karim.

Exhibition – VDU ART (THOUGH I HATE THE WORD ART) by WALID ELSAWI 

VDU ART (though I hate the word art) 
Walid Elsawi – Solo exhibition
Opening: Monday, 3rd  September 2018, 7pm
Exhibition runs till: 30 September 2018
Open daily from 3pm until 9pm, except Fridays
  
VDU ART  (though I hate the word art) is an exhibition of video works by Walid Elsawi that posit artmaking as a self-reflexive, humorous and absurd practice. Shot in a grainy, low-tech aesthetic, the video works do not present themselves as static products, but the result of a complicit conscious act, engaged in by the artist and made overt in the content of the work. Elsawi creates videos which utilize humor and a subtle sexuality, making heavy use of irony and the artist’s own internal monologue.

Exhibition – Film Implosion

 Experiments in Swiss Cinema and Moving Images 

  • Opening at Medrar for Contemporary Art: Thursday 8 February, 7pm, till 15 March 2018
    Exhibition is open daily from 3pm until 9pm, except Fridays.
  • Presentation by François Bovier and Adeena Mey of films by Robert Beavers & Gregory Markopoulos at Cimatheque club: 7pm, Friday 9th of February.
  • Open conversation with artist Urs Breitenstein at Medrar and screening his personal work and collection of works by Werner von Mutzenbecher & André Lehmann: 7pm, Saturday 10th of February.
  • Closing event with special screening of Geschichte der Nacht, (1978) in the presence of it’s director Clemens Klopfenstein at Cimatheque club: 7pm, 15th of March.

Film Implosion! is an exhibition dedicated to Swiss experimental cinema. It sheds light on a less known aspect of the country’s art history by presenting a panorama of genres and practices within the mediums of film and video from the 1960ʼs until today. Artists challenge the traditional codes of cinema through formal interventions directly on the celluloid, unconventional documentaries, political, feminist, animated, and fiction films.

Film Implosion! outlines the multiple discourses and viewpoints that surface from these filmic and para-filmic productions by offering two types of readings that echo one another. It presents audiences with different investigative directions around the artwork with the historical and critical distance provided by research, as well as an experience of the unique atmosphere of expanded cinema’s festive events in the 1960’s – a time when films were collectively projected during concerts or performances, far from the codes of classical “movie screening.”

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pro Helvetia Cairo, Medrar for Contemporary Art presents a version of the exhibition, curated by François Bovier and Adeena Mey, which highlights comparable ways of addressing the primary structures of film in its rough form, by artists and filmmakers alike. It recalls the fundamentals of video art language that we know today, traced back to earlier expressive forms against the conventions of classical cinema. Ranging from abstract animation to collage practices and documentary mode, the featured works share a desire to deconstruct the conventions of filmic language and reinvent representation. After focusing for several years on the realm of video art, Medrar steps closer to the worlds of avant-garde and experimental film, blurring the traditional medium based distinction of moving image experimentation.

Film Implosion was first shown at Fri Art Kunsthalle (Fribourg, Switzerland) from November 2015 to February 2016, followed by a re-run at the Museum für Gestaltung (Zurich, Switzerland) in February–April 2017. The exhibition was initially curated by François Bovier and Balthazar Lovay, taking as its starting point a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and conducted by the Zurich University of the arts (with Thomas Schärer and Fred Truniger) and the University of Lausanne (with François Bovier and Adeena Mey). The first version of this exhibition intended to show the diversity and scattering of the experimental and artists’ films scenes in Switzerland.

Team

Baltazar Lovay
Gelan Hafny
Dia Hamed
Mohamed Allam
Mido Sadek

Special Thanks to

Erich Langyar
Amira El-Masry
Ors Brighstein
Patrick Signaler (Okta Films)
Dalia Sulieman
Sara Allam
Christine Serdali (Vmac)
Clemens Klopvenstein
Maged Nader
Marion Bocour
Maxa Tsolar
Marwa BenHalim
Mai Elwakil
Nahla Suleiman
Yasmine Desouki

Exhibition – Hybrid Spaces

A solo exhibition by Ahmed Elshaer
Photography, Video, Video game

Opening: Sunday 14 January, 7pm, 
Daily from 3pm until 9pm, except Fridays

Exploring hybrid spaces that have been created through strategy games which reflect the relationships between the virtual and physical world. In these spaces, you have the opportunity to explore a different world or create your own with tools available within this space.

This is how the controversy ended over how novelist Jules Verne extraordinary journeys were the end of its era, where it was said that it was no longer possible to travel to unknown places on earth. In “other spaces” man became wandering with space-time scenarios of different and unusual premise in the virtual worlds or redesigning the place with the concept of hybrid spaces in the virtual world but in reality.

The project came through walking around the sites and places that got the trait of the hybrid space with the same hypothesis and tools of these spaces in the virtual world of strategy games in which i found several points that have this particular trait.The starting point was a refugee camp in Calais, northwestern France and the site of the Atlantic Wall in Dunkirk. The first part of the project has been carried out in France and the second part in cairo.

Exhibition – AMRIYA BY BRYONY DUNNE

Opening: Saturday, 9th December 2017, 7pm
Exhibition runs till: 23rd December 2017
Daily from 3 pm to 9 pm, except Friday

This exhibition presents works made by Irish artist Bryony Dunne over the past four years when she lived between Egypt and her native country. In film, photography, installation and sculpture, Dunne draws together research-driven documentary projects with her own artistic interpretations.

Dunne’s work examines the volatile relationship of man with nature, and often traces the historical links between the two countries, Ireland and Egypt, she calls home. These links are manifested in her photography and video works from Dublin’s Natural History Museum, Cairo’s Agricultural Museum and the Giza Zoo, among other sites.

During her early work in South Sinai, Dunne met a 70-year-old Bedouin woman, who lives year-round in her orchard, solo and self-sustained. One day, after weeks of repeated in-depth visits, Amriya said, “You should make a film about me and my doctors [her orchard and the mountains].” That film was made—a prologue to the other works in “Amriya”—and this solo exhibition is dedicated to her.

There will be a live performance by sound artist Asem Tag at 9pm on the opening night – Sat 9th Dec

Exhibition –  A Green House by Marwan ElGamal

Opening: 1 October 2017, 7pm
Exhibition runs till: 19th October 2017
Daily from 3pm until 9pm, except Friday
Address: 7 Gamal El Din Abou El Mahasen, 1st floor, Apt 4, Garden City

Inspired by epic stories, Marwan Elgamal created the animation “A Green House”. Visually influenced by Islamic manuscripts and ancient Egyptian aesthetics, as well as by contemporary movies, shows, games and comic books, his animations evoke curiosity, estrangement and nostalgia.

“A Green House” is centered around the theme of constant transformation, a transcendence without trial, a familiar meeting with things unknown. It is a pretence where the two main characters accept unfoldings, as if they are not newcomers, nothing baffles them, taking in the events with an interminable smile, everything makes sense to them when it shouldn’t. They are born as adults, they share a home where the peaks of mountains on the horizon are in hands’ reach, a confounding splitting sea is at their breakfast table. The roof of their house is given arms extended and brought together at the palms with fingers pointing upward. They are met with a vision and a delegate descends to usher them upwards, on and on, into five realms.

During this journey they come across alternate spatial points, machines and entities, where concepts have taken form, and that seem to imbue them with novel characteristics and lessons. Through the red desolate cube, the tingling blue mist of the sphere, through the lustful golden prism, in the mechanical unravelling x, through the dispersing boundless flower. They become altered with each development until they are endlessly evolved – or have not changed in the least. They are fulfilling their life goal, it is exhilarating and expected at the same time. A life where the void extending beyond their limits is another arm to grab hold of, where the farthest distance is beyond the sun or somewhere next to the living room.


Exhibition – Naema’s Office is Bleeding 3 

“Naema’s Office is Bleeding 3”, is an exhibition of the most notable artworks produced during the painting and collage workshop, instructed by artist Hany Rashed.  

Opening: Sunday 27 August, 7pm. The exhibition will run from Sunday, 27 August to Thursday, 14 September 2017 at Medrar, Daily from 4pm to 10pm except Fridays.  

All artworks are for sale at nominal prices.

MEDRAR AT SUPERMARKET – STOCKHOLM INDEPENDENT ART FAIR

We’re excited to announce that Medrar is participating Supermarket 2017 – Stockholm Independent Art Fair 23–26 March. Featuring artworks by artists Ahmed Sabry, Dania Hany, Esraa Elfeky, Marwa Saad, Mohamed Elmaghraby, and Nourhan Maayouf.

Exhibition – Discursiveness 

By Yannick Jacquet and Fred Penelle
Dia Hamed

The exhibition Discursiveness suggests analogy within the works of Yannick Jacquet, Fred Penelle and Dia Hamed as instances of an expansive communication between tactile ( and digital forms of practice. Their works meander across multiple stages and mediums like printmaking, sculpture and digital media. With a passion for luminance and shades, their works not only accentuate the stability of materials in static objects, but also strengthens the viewer’s senses towards the motion represented in a set of blinking pixels. In an immersive non-discursive setup, Jacquet and Penelle address transmission in old school wood engraving, vintage technologies and digital masking, while Hamed procedurally shuffles through skill, tool and automation. He tries to jabber in a conversation in which one can lose track of how “things” are made, lingering over the intermediate processes, languages and technologies of creation.

Mécaniques Discursives,Terrain and Viscosity, digitally animate and illuminate physical forms. Time deconstruction allow for invoking reverberation among the exhibited pieces. Transcending of substance towards observable mechanisms is how Yannick, Fred and Dia echo within the walls of Medrar’s exhibition space.

Mécaniques Discursives
Installation by Yannick Jacquet and Fred Penelle

Mécaniques Discursives

While the passage of time seems to accelerate every day, Fred Penelle and Yannick Jacquet offer a pause, a suspension, a breath. A strange mechanism stretches across the wall, populated with shadowy chimeras. They are mysterious and yet somehow familiar. Is this a laboratory experiment or the plan for a future network? Minutely constructed like a fine clock, it traces connections, routes, genuinely-false, looping itineraries, inviting escape, inviting dreams. The narrative is deconstructed like a thousand-storied film script. Every effort is made to lead astray, to turn around, to forge ahead. Time is shredded, decomposed, lost…and yet everything references it. Mécaniques Discursives is like a parenthesis between two epochs: Gutenberg’s and Big Data’s. By contrasting the oldest form of image reproduction (woodcutting) with the most recent digital technologies, the installation straddles centuries and contracts time.


Terrain, Viscosity
Two installations by Dia Hamed

We’re currently witnessing an excessive development in the field of augmented vision. Various platforms are asking us to look around in 360º. A market boost in virtual reality products promotes a new experience of perceiving the surrounding environments, using additional information and intuitive controls. In order to supply enough media for such influx, big effort is now exerted in offering artists, designers and “ordinary people” accessibility to create and manipulate three dimensional worlds. Yet the act of simplifying 3D software interfaces contributes to our disconnection from the inherent complexity of how  such tools are able to mimic surfaces and shades of our physical reality.

Dia Hamed draws back to the very essence of matter formation, trying to find resonance in the evolution of appearance from states of absolute randomness to patterns of natural systems, as well as in the development of computer algorithms from mathematical turbulence functions to spectacular simulations of natural textures. Random systems gain aesthetic appeal when they become manifest in pattern order. Patterns can only develop when randomness is perturbed by external forces, whether natural as of energy (gravity, pressure and temperature applied to particles) or artificial as of parameter adjustments (function dimensions and random seed number applied to pixels). Solid structures and fluid dynamics seem to share the same governing rule: the irregularity of data fluctuation, where data in this sense define the position and brightness of pixels on screen, same way as it does to particles in the real world.

Hamed transforms the medium from one state to another, between automated tools and the artist’s manual intervention. The symptom of Oscillation in his compositional process echos the irregular variations in which matter originates. Terrain and Viscosity are exercises in abstraction. Using light as the animating component of presentation, the visuals combine filmed natural textures with their peer synthetic representation in pixels, and converge over the surface of physical sculptures.

Terrain involves digital projection mapping on a raised-relief map. It highlights the contributions of Georgy Voronoi, Ken Musgrave and Kim Perlin to the world of computer graphics, specifically their discoveries in noise algorithms to simulate solid nature forms. Viscosity compares microscopic footage of soap reactions to its code generated simulation, within a sculpture made out of materials that were once in a liquid state. Viscosity features Alan Turing’s reaction diffusion systems and Steven Worley’s cell noise to simulate liquid forms.

Opening: Monday 19 December 2016, 7pm
Exhibition runs till 19 January 2017
Daily from 3pm until 9pm, except Friday
Address: 7 Gamal El Din Abou El Mahasen, 1st floor, Apt 4, Garden City

Graphic design: Tarek Rady
Translation: Sara Allam
Technical support: Mido Sadek


Roznama 5

 Visual Arts Competition & Exhibition from Egypt 

Medrar for Contemporary Art, Mashrabia Gallery of Contemporary Art, And SOMA Art School and Gallery

From 4 September 2016 to 5 October 2016

Opening 
Sunday 4 September 2016, 7 pm, Medrar, Mashrabia, Soma.

Roznama is a periodical competition and exhibition for contemporary visual art by young Egyptians, organized by Medrar for Contemporary Arts. The competition’s objective is to encourage creative contemporary artworks, which are different from the classical forms taught at art academies. This is achieved through providing a space for experimentation, research, and mixed media and multimedia production. Roznama also takes an interest in traditional art forms, such as painting, sculpting, and avant-garde photography. Roznama aspires to become a platform that presents distinguished artworks, introducing artists from Egypt and supporting them by all possible means.

Roznama 5 is supported by Peacock, and Yunus Emre Institute (Turkish Cultural Center in Cairo)

 Awards 

  • Solo exhibition presented by Medrar, Artists Ahmed Sorour and Malak Yakout.
  • Three months residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris- France. Presented by Institute Francais (Ahmed Shawky)
  • 5000 EGP presented by Mashrabia Gallery, Artist Imane Ibrahim.
  • 5000 EGP presented by Gypsum gallery, Artist Ahmed Shawky. 
  • 5000 EGP presented by Al-Ismaelia for Real Estate Investment, Artist Ahmed Tawfig.
  • 5000 EGP collective prize presented by the artists (Mohamed Abla, Shady El Noshokaty, Hany Rashed, Hala Elkoussy, Huda Lotfy), Artist Ahmed Sorour shared with artist Malak Yakout.
  • Photography prize presented by CIC, Contemporary Image Collective, Artist Nourhan Maayouf. 
  • 1000 EGP coupon for art purchases presented by Alwan stationary, Artist Mona Essam.

Addresses 
Medrar for Contemporary Art
7 Gamal El Din Abou El Mahasen St
Garden City, Cairo
Daily, from 3pm until 9pm, except Fridays

Mashrabia Gallery of Contemporary Art
8, Champollion St, Donwtown, Cairo
Daily, from 11am until 8pm, except Fridays

SOMA Art School and Gallery
14 Maraashli St, Zamalek, Cairo
Daily, from 12pm until 9pm, except Fridays

Curated by: Mohamed Allam, Ghita Skali

Project manager:
Peacock, and Medrar’s teamwork (Dahlia Salem, Mohammed El Boghdady, Isabella Bommarito, Yasmine Nagui, Ghita Skali, Fatma Elzahraa, Mina Fakhry, Karim Adel)

Jury: Khaled Hafez, Osama Dawod, Mohamed Abdelkarim

Graphic design: Tarek Rady
Technical support: Mido Sadek
Thanks to: Dia Hamed, Hany Rashed

Exhibition – Naema’s Office is Bleeding 2 

“Naema’s Office is Bleeding 2”, is an exhibition of the most notable artworks that were produced during the painting and collage workshop by artist Hany Rashed.

Opening Thursday, 10 March 2016, at 7 pm.

The exhibition will run for 10 days, from 10 to 21 March 2016 at Medrar.
Daily from 4 p.m to 9 p.m.

All artworks are for sale at nominal prices