“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.
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
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
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
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
“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
Second Comics Week in Egypt
Exhibition by Swiss artist Barbara Mauli
Opening 3 February 2015 7 p.m.
The exhibition lasts from 3 to 7 November 2015.
Exhibit daily from 3pm to 9pm except Friday
Medrar will host at 7pm next Monday 2 November 2015 the opening of the second edition of “Comics Week in Egypt” which this year sees entries from Switzerland, England, Germany, and the United States as well as extensive entries by Egyptian artists.
The organization of “Sefsafa” for the second cycle of COMICS Week is part of the Foundation’s attempt to publicize this area and promote the exchange of experiences between Egyptians and Europeans on the one hand, and Egyptian artists and some others on the other, as well as the most important challenges facing COMICS art in Egypt and the prospects it presents for young people.
This week was chosen as the “art of comics and freedom of expression”, where one cannot live without the other.
This year’s cycle includes two training workshops for amateurs and professionals, two round tables on the art of “comics and freedom of expression”, one on “Independent publishing in comics”, an exhibition by artist Barbara Moyle (Switzerland) and another exhibition compiled by a number of Egyptian artists.
Egyptian artist Khaled al-Safati will be honored on the closing day for his pioneering role in promoting the field of comics in Egypt.
Medrar for Contemporary Art in collaboration with Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) presents
Roznama 4
Visual Arts Competition & Exhibition from Egypt
5 September – 5 October 2015
Vacation: from Saturday 19 until Sunday 27 September
Opening:
Saturday 5 September, 7pm, Medrar
Sunday 6 September, 7pm, CIC
Daily, from 3pm until 9pm, except Fridays
Awards Ceremony:
Thursday 17 September, 7pm, Medrar.
Roznama is an annual competition and exhibition for contemporary visual arts, organized by Medrar for Contemporary Art and – this year’s edition – in collaboration with Contemporary Image Collective.
A platform for the full spectrum of visual art mediums, ranging from the traditional to the most experimental, Roznama showcases the latest and most notable video art, digital art, photography, graphic art, painting, sculpture, ceramics, installations and mixed media creations by young and emerging Egyptian artists under 30 years old.
Competition prizes are offered by the British Council, Ismaelia company for Real Estate Investment, the Townhouse Gallery, CIC, Alwan Stationary, and artists Adel El Siwi, Ahmed El Askalani, Hala El Koussy, Hany Rashed, Huda Lutfi and Mohamed Abla.
An Exhibition of Drawings by Maghraby & Tawfig
I always see objects under the microscope to understand what they are, but what If I put the crimson shoe under the microscope? Salma said.
Salma’s use of the microscope is purely for informational purposes; the microscope is sort of an eye that Salma sees through… sees the reality of things around her.
Whenever Salma puts an object under the microscope … fines lines appear … and form a structural creation … in an unregulated mechanical movement. Salma sat for days looking through the microscope… observing the structural creation .. that constantly changes.
The Crimson Shoe was the only object she never put under the microscope, as all she had was an old painting of the shoe and not the shoe itself.
Salma went to the shoe maker with the painting of the shoe.
How do you have this painting? The shoe maker asked
So you have the Crimson Shoe? Salma said
Yes, the shoe maker replied.
Salma quickly took the shoe…put it under the microscope…and a serial number appears: 10426003850620… Salma looks up and wanders what these numbers are.
The Good, the Bad and the Crimson Shoe
Opening: 2 August 2015, 7pm
Exhibition runs through 20 August 2015
Daily from 3pm until 9pm, except Friday
Address: 7 Gamal El Din Abou El Mahasen, 1st floor, Apt 4, Garden City
On the occasion of launching the fourth edition of Roznama competition and exhibition for visual arts, Medrar celebrates the winner of the last edition, by presenting “Hello, I’m an artist”, Sara Nabil’s first solo exhibition.
At “Beirut”, a contemporary art centre located in Cairo, I met and talked with the assistant curator, a graduate of Fine Arts of the American University in Cairo, of the space and her advice to me was to always introduce myself… to shake hands like this … and to say I am … and I do … that I cannot just make art and neglect this part.
Sara Nabil introduces herself and her artistic project through her first solo exhibition “Hello, I’m an artist” where she presents some personal experiences using different artistic mediums, including photography, drawing, painting, installation and video. In general, her work touches upon 3 main issues: the instinct to colour which drove her to study art at a young age, the relation between art and the public, and contemporary art vs. romanticism.
Opening: Tuesday 2 June 2015 at 7pm
through 16 June 2015.
Daily from 3 pm to 9 pm, except Friday.
Address: 7 Gamal El Din Abou El Mahasen St., 1st floor, apt. 4, Garden City, Cairo
This exhibition is one of Medrar’s prizes for Roznama 3.
Roznama 3 comes to an end, yet not before we celebrate the winners of last year’s edition. Medrar for Contemporary Art is delighted to present Chocolate Bar of the Future, the first solo exhibition by artist Hend Samir.
Hend’s artwork takes a critical view of modern consumerism, individuals’ shopping habits and the role of advertising in manipulating consumer behavior.
Chocolate Bar of the Future emulates the visual and sentimental experiences of shopping, with a collection of paintings based on manipulation of photos and magazine advertisements. The vivid colours of her artwork establish a dream-like surreal quality, suggest excitement, self actualization, and quite often solace.
Her works have also been exhibited at the Mattress Factory Museum in USA and at Supermarket art Fair in Stockholm, Sweden.
Opening: Sunday 10 May 2015 at 7pm
through 24 May 2015.
Daily from 3 pm to 9 pm, except Friday.
Address: 7 Gamal El Din Abou El Mahasen St., 1st floor, apt. 4, Garden City, Cairo
This exhibition is one of Medrar’s award for Roznama 3.
Roznama 4 will kick off soon, so stay tuned!
Medrar is happy to present “Naema’s Office is Bleeding”, an exhibition of the output of a painting and collage workshop by artist Hany Rashed.
The Exhibition will run for 3 days, from 4 to 6 May 2015 at Medrar.
The Exhibition includes works that have been developed
and produced during the workshop, under the mentorship of artist Hany Rashed.
Medrar would like to thank the guest artists: Huda Lotfy, Mohammed Taman, Shady El Noshokaty, Mohamed Abla, Ahmed Sabry for their generous contribution to the workshop.
Opening Tuesday 9 December 2014, 7 p.m
The exhibition from 9 December 2014 to 6 January 2015,the exhibition has been extended, and will show until January 29, except Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 23rd, 24th, 25th January.
Daily from 3 p.m to 9 p.m, Except Fridays
Badry shows his series of sculptures and illustrated drawing as a proposal for objects that recover usefulness as much as possible, as a sort of provisionary design movement. Badry’s objects, however, will not be helpful, because his objects are made with useless and non-functional materials; papers and cardboard. his objects are not there to play a role in a socially engaged practice; rather, they operate as a pair of spectacles, which he uses to frame, and focus on, social and political issues dealing with several phenomena – questioning the ability of the global system and corporatization, objects and instruments of daily life to become a paradigm of normalization.
the internet is full of images from plenty of people who can only resemble the manipulation system – they do not exist inside of it: they reproduce the everyday useful objects in another frame, where provisional innovations act as optimal solutions in order to be out of the system. They demonstrate unique methods of composition, precariously reproducing the regular machines, tools and instruments as a means of creating their own ones. In turn, Badry reproduces their innovations as totally useless in respect of their size and materials – as monument: hailing contingency.
Text: Mohamed Abdelkarim
Poster Design: Amr Elkafrawy
This exhibition would not have been possible without the help of many friends and artists
