We announce “Exhibition—This Is Not A Landscape: An Open Studio.”
This Is Not A Landscape is a continuation of a process that was started by artist Azza Ezzat in 2018, after she was commissioned to draw a typical landscape sketch, only to realize that every time she tried to sketch out the urban landscape around her, something in the built environment kept constantly changing challenging any notion of a landscape or solid structure that could be rendered to a one-dimensional surface. This instability and complexity of the urban landscape have been a constant feature of Egypt’s modernization as construction over the past two hundred years has been characterized by sudden ruptures or spontaneous acts of informality. Yet what makes the contemporary reality of the city more challenging was the degree of transformation of the built environment to a degree not seen since the Napoleonic Campaign and the reimagining of Egypt and also Cairo as a city. The destabilising forces of development and expansion, that move according to an accelerated and completely centralized pace, meant that the city was being destroyed and rebuilt faster than what anyone can expect or imagine.
Against this backdrop, Azza wanted to expand the process that started as an attempt to capture something that can’t be captured on a flat surface, to a collaborative process where she thinks along with other artists about the ways in which the city has been violently setting and resetting conditions of livability, daily work and movement, but a fundamental sense of self that is constantly assaulted by acts of destruction and reconstruction that appear random as they are disruptive.
The format developed by Azza and Ismail Fayed, is an open studio program that invites artists and audience to think together about the different strategies of developing the work, but also in understanding the potential that lies behind each project. In this group showcase of different work-in-progress projects, and in partnership with Medrar, Azza, Mariam, Amira, Farah, Farah, Luz, Dalila, Mona and Ibrahim have engaged in a continuous dialogue about possibilities of understanding those transformations, moving from the private to the public, the domestic to the urban, the center to the periphery, from infrastructure to superstructure, and from the position of the inhabitant to one of the outsider. Each artist developed a project that stemmed from a practice embedded in questions about experience and memory, and the way the city influences our notions of space and identity.
Through a program of invited guests and facilitators, including artists Helena Abdel Nasser, Yasmine El Meleegy, urban researcher Ahmed Borham, digital fabricator Eslam Ali and with support from ADEF, the artists got to experiment with different approaches and methodologies in exploring space and materials and expanding a vocabulary of research and framing but also methods of practice that helped the artists expand possibilities of production beyond their own medium and form.
This was accompanied by public moments where the audience was invited to join throughout the program, giving feedback, and reflecting with the artists on their different propositions and experiments.
For the showcase the artists chose different iterations of the work, to share with the public, but also are inviting the public to extend this dialogue and think together, in a moment fraught with great uncertainty and catastrophic change, what kind of landscape can we imagine? And how can we inhabit it?
Opening Tuesday, 22nd of July 2025, at 7 PM, running until Tuesday, 29th of July 2025, from 4 to 9 PM, except Friday and Saturday.
Address: Medrar, 10 Gamal Eldin Abo ElMahsen, 8th floor, Garden City, Cairo.
