Exhibition – Blink 2

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Medrar hosts ‘Blink’ exhibition by selected students of the American University in Cairo

On Saturday 7 December 2013, Medrar for Contemporary Art is set to host ‘Blink’ exhibition, featuring the works of selected students from the Visual Arts Department at the American University in Cairo.

‘Blink’ is curated by visual artist and associate professor in AUC’s visual arts department Shady El-Noshokaty, and will be on show in Medrar’s space in Garden City until 25 December 2013.

The works presented include contemporary photography , experimental animation along with audio and video art works. The artworks, presented by 21 students explore the moment of art making that turns an idea into a unique creation process.

Exhibiting artists include: Aya El-Mofty, Habiba Allam, Hala Hisham, Lina Nabrawy, Malak Yacout Saleh, Nada I. Fathy, Nazly Abaza, Mohamed Talaia, Omar Ashour, Omar Hamdalla, Omar Mobarek, Rawaa Sherif, Riham Ali Kassim, Salma Aboul Hussein, Tuqa El-Harouny, Yasmina Kabbara, Zeina Madwar, Nathalie Lothfy, Maya Shafei, Islam Shabana and Nadine El Awadly.

The opening night will start at 8pm on Saturday 7 December and the show will be on display in Medrar for Contemporary Art until 25 December.

Opening Hours: Everyday (except Friday) from 4-9pm

Blink: The moment of unequivocal, uncertain, unspecified and unrealistic judgment is one, which travels through a narrow wormhole to infinite space with no gravity. This moment might also teleport itself with magically accelerated speed from one point to another in one corner of our mind. The process described is an act of thinking and research.

How can we measure the distance between these very points in a vacuum that reconstitutes itself with each and every attempt to capture an idea that alters all sites, vanishes certainty, and starts a new journey of sequential trace for a new idea? What if we stopped observing and analyzing the horizon from a distance and started testing our ability to detect and experiment in another domain, perhaps a virtual one?

When do we stop pursuing remnants of those pictures, letters and sounds scattered in the neglected rubble of files in our memories. And when do we stop trying out the joy of detecting their magical creativity when they are composed and reformed again in uncertain new systems, ones that are not fixed, and are unrealistic…  This is an invitation to pursue that moment of renewable dissatisfaction, curiosity and wonder in every attempt at a new discovery. It is the essence of art and constitutes a mystical experience.

A group of students exhibiting at Medrar for Contemporary Art present their creativity in the performing arts, audio, video processing, and animation. They strive to reproach that moment in these experiments, that may still be one of the earliest phases of creation and may change momentarily to become a new creation.

ROZNAMA 2

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 Roznama 2 

 Visual arts exhibition for young Egyptian artists 

In Urdu, Roznama refers to daily occurrences. A collection of days, weeks and months of human life, that host events and occurrences, giving them shape, texture and taste. In the second edition of this group exhibition, Roznama attempts to present a curated collection of visual contemporary art works dealing with an array of mediums for expression. The artworks are concerned with socio-political realities and events that shape the world around us through this moment of change we are witnessing.

Roznama 2 looks beyond the obvious, perhaps even naive representations of events that are part of our daily intake of them, and jumps into the deeper analysis of the human experience surrounding them.

Opening Saturday 26 October 2013, 8 pm From 26 October to 16 November 2013

Daily from 4 to 10 pm, Closed Friday Roznama 2

INTERLAB ARTIFICIAL EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

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Cairo – Dresden

Artificial Emotional Intelligence

This exhibition creates a space for innovative interaction through modern technologies designed by media artists and technologists from Cairo, Egypt and Dresden, Germany. The artworks come to life only when the audience interact with them, and the audience are thus invited in this process to either create or be the artwork.

InterLAB: Artificial Emotional Intelligence is made with the support of The Culture Resource, MitOst, European Cultural Foundation, Robert Bosh Stifung, Mimeta, Stichting Doen Foundation

Workshop and Exhibition – Bearing Witness

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Bearing Witness

Through a series of artistic work sessions through five weeks. The workshops were planned as to discuss real stories experienced or witnessed by ordinary people in extraordinary situations and times, as base to produce inspired art projects, by proposing methods to approach the artistic problem, concept, and form, taking into consideration their relation to the community. Through ‘Bearing Witness’ participants produced individual and group projects based on the discussions with contexts relating to the current social, ideological and political shifts.

Bearing Witness: the stories of ordinary people living during extraordinary times is a contemporary art theory and practice project that is based on the methodology of Plexus International’s co-operas.  Dr. Sandro Dernini and a group of international artists founded Plexus to create large-scale collaborative art projects known as co-operas during the 1980s in New York City’s Lower East Side.

The objective of Bearing Witness was to provide an artistic eyewitness account to the extraordinary experiences of ordinary Egyptians living during these extraordinary times.  During extraordinary times, stories tend to be told more sincerely.  Sharing and appreciating such stories helps bridge individual differences by creating a collective consciousness and awareness of the “other.”

The Workshop

A workshop for the production of collaborative multi-disciplinary projects around the concept of bearing witness to stories told by ordinary people living during extraordinary times, based on the methodology of Plexus International’s co-operas. During the three weeks of workshops, investigation and collaborative work was developed in a context of community dialogue, personal encounters, and collective learning using both theory and practice.

Exhibition

Display of art works realized by the participants during the Bearing Witness workshop, most of the works where the first exhibited piece of the artist, featuring films, multimedia installations, photography, sound art performances, paintings and ceramics

Bearing Witness was conceived by artist/educator Arturo Lindsay and is being developed in collaboration with Atlanta and Cairo based artists, educators, technicians and students.

SOLOUS IRISH/ARABIAN ‘AVANT-GARDE’ FILM TOUR

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The Solus Irish/ Arabian avant-garde film tour brings the works of over 20 filmmakers and artists from Muslim, Arabic speaking countries to 8 venues around Ireland in autumn 2009, running concurrently with the screening of work by 15 emerging and established Irish/international filmmakers in 3 North African and Middle Eastern venues.

Medrar curated a special programme within the Irish tour, which the final stop of was at the Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co. Wicklow / Sunday, November 15th / 3pm – 5pm

MEDRAR Curated Programme:

The Pick 4: Exhibition in Townhouse Gallery

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The fourth edition of The Pick, Townhouse’s bi-annual exhibition, introduced the latest generation of artists, featuring works by students and recent graduates. Most of the work on view in The Pick 4 was new, developed through close discussion with the curators. In this way, the exhibition serves not only to promote and encourage young artists but also to expose them to the curatorial process and critical collaboration.

WITHIN THE REGION: VIDEO TOURING PROGRAM

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Within the Region: a touring program of contemporary videos from the Arab Region

Identity, individuality, politics and regional issues have all come to the foreground of the art scene in the Arab region, which has lent the region its distinctiveness.

Within the Region is a program that approaches such concepts while striving to represent or depict different fragments of the reality of its existence that often lie in contrast to the ways in which it is perceived outside of the region.
As a contemporary medium, the featured videos manifest how contemporary artists from Arab countries examine these matters with subtlety, wariness and sensibility, while striving to give rise to various questions about the diversity involved in practicing video arts.

Within the Region is a selection of high-concept/ low-budget videos produced by emerging video artists from Arab countries. One of main aspects of the program is that it offers up-and-coming Arab artists a chance to exhibit their work in the internationally as well as the local arena.

As a touring program this selection was shown in various art spaces around the world between 2008-2010, where a publication documenting all the activities that will have surrounded the event at each tour stop will be created and distributed around all venues that hosted the screenings.

The Tour:

–  3rd Biennale of Contemporary Arts in Seville, Spain (Biacs 3) on 2 October 2008

– Bejing Art Fair at the China International Gallery Exposition CIGE on the 12th and 13th of April 2009.

– Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, China, on the 4th and the 11th of February 2010.

– Elastic Arts Foundation (EAF) in Chicago ,USA,  in collaboration with Onlookfilms on May 1st , 2010

ROZNAMA

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 Roznama 

Video and photography exhibition

This video and photography exhibition dealt with utilizing the visual image as means of direct communication with society. The exhibition presented the works of 8 young visual artists attempting to deal with marginalized issues and concepts that are gradually fading from the collective consciousness.