This year we are working to present cycles related to the Middle East. We will especially have curatorships from Iran, Palestine, Turkey and Egypt, which include a selection of artists from these countries but also from Sudán, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. The guest curators are Shaghayegh Norouzi (ira), Mena El Shazly (artistic director of Cairo Video Festival) & Mohamed Allam of Medrar for Contemporary Art (egi), Lara Khaldi (pal), Ulya Soley & Fatma Çolakoğlu (tur) and Reem Shadid (pal).
These curators will allow attendees to become aware of the relationship between the geographical context, the political and social situation and their influence on video art.
Iranian Collection
Shaghayegh Norouzi (ira)
ESHA SADR – Flight 752
FARZANE GHADYANLOO – Daily dose of life
NEGAR HAMIDI – Mortal
AVA AGHAKOUCHAK – Sarotis & Sovar
Debris
Ulya Soley & Fatma Çolakoğlu (tur)
/ˈdebriː/ Could it be the rubbish or pieces of material that are left somewhere and are not wanted or could it also be the pieces of wood, metal, building materials, etc. that are left after something has been destroyed? – by definition debris, innately captures a literal and nonliteral epitome of what urban life has become in the twenty-first century. The program, debris with works by artists Serra Tansel, Deniz Tortum, Özden Demir, Kadir Kayserilioğlu and Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, peeks into the cityscape; the videos poetically encapsulate juxtaposed images of observed everyday objects or occurrences. The current landscape of the city and the notion of transformation, climate crisis, gentrification and displacement, altogether point to an alarming darkness. Civilization, in H.G. Wells’s words, a race between disaster and education, suitably fits the duality of human evolution which has become ever more convoluted. Through short, abstract stories of urban distortion, debris probes into the validity of the environment’s unwanted or destroyed spaces.
Serra Tansel, The Gate, 2011, 01’45’’
Deniz Tortum, Floodplain, 2019, 12’07’’
Özden Demir, Net17950, 2012, 9’
Kadir Kayserilioğlu, Dreams Of Wild Boars, 2018, 5’27’’
Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Respiration, 2018-19, 5’23
Filthy Orchestra: A Selection from Medrar’s Production Workshops (2007-2017)
Mena El Shazly (Cairo Video Festival) & Mohamed Allam (Medrar for Contemporary Art ) (egy)
What happens when the contextual basis of the video work is destroyed? Is there an unconscious redefinition of artistic intention? From ironic contexts and occurrences ripped out of their context, to attempts at introducing new hypothetical contexts and shifting between environments, the program explores Cairo as context and the context as a platform for visual experimentation.
All videos in this program are produced by Medrar between the years 2007 and 2017. With every edition of Cairo Video Festival, a video art and experimental film production workshop is held in Medrar as a tool to establish an outreach program for local artists and students, and to encourage collaboration, as well as to stimulate the creation of video art and help spread it. Each workshop selects around five projects to be produced during the workshop under the supervision of two trainers. Along with the technical aspect on editing, cinematography, animation and production, the workshops have a strong focus on the conceptual element of filmmaking. Participants dive into topics such as the history of cinema and regional realities of filmmaking, critically looking at produced artworks to discover together their own approach to translating an idea and developing it further into a film. The program assists the participants to realize their ideas, starting from the conceptual process up to planning, production, post-production and screenings and distribution of the films.
Medrar for Contemporary Art is an artist-led space in Cairo, Egypt, running since 2005. Medrar holds three ongoing projects; the Roznama Competition for Egyptian artists under 30 years of age, of which there have been 6 editions and which has recently been expanded into the Roznama Studio Program for emerging artists; Cairo Video Festival, an annual festival of video art and experimental films from around the world; Medrar TV, an online channel disseminating audio-visual content on the Arab cultural scene. Medrar also operates as a gallery space, organizing and hosting visual arts exhibitions, film screenings, artists talks, and training workshops for artists.
Cairo Video Festival is a regular showcase of video art and experimental film organized by Medrar. The festival’s vision is to highlight worldwide experiments in the moving image, particularly video art. The festival is a space for artists from around the world to showcase their most-recent video art productions, and a platform for dialogue and knowledge exchange. Each edition offers an insight into current art practices, and also into the local and global production of video art and experimental film. The 10th edition’s international open call for submission will be launched in 2021.
Hala Abu Shady – Pink
Hosam Elsawah – Kekh
Nadia Mounier – Made in China
Ahmed Shawky Hassan – Cactus Painting
Ahmed Sabry – The impact of meat
Marguerite Farag – Studio Dunia
Ahmed El Shaer – Crossover
Speculative Imaginaries
Reem Shadid (pal)
Today, we assign most of what is too ‘unimaginable’ in the world such as wars, non-human takeovers and various forms of natural disasters to (science)fiction, video game, etc. We are in a visual loop where that which is real, but we were unable to imagine in the past, is still deemed fiction. A real, where it is difficult to form new visualizations that allow us to begin to think of, and create a new imaginary; other forms of individual and social existence; an emancipation of the systems that perpetuate the loop.
Speculative Imaginaries brings together a selection of video works that urge a different re-reading of narratives to enable other social, political, economic and environmental possibilities and visualizations to emerge. The program explores how the use of image manipulation, gaming and computer-generated images when intertwined with personal and collective experiences and histories, can allow us to consider other imaginaries. Employing various digital techniques, the artists deconstruct the conditions that engulf us today creating extensions of realities that reveal how human motion can be automated,futures can become past, contexts can be detached and social structures can be exposed.
Speculative Imaginaries is curated by Reem Shadid and features works by Mohammad Alfaraj (Saudi Arabia), Tareque Elsharquawy (Egypt), Ahmed Isamaldin (Sudan) and Bahar Noorizadeh (Iran).
Tareque sharquawy – Psychoticles-Permutations, 2019 (11:56)
Bahar Noorizadeh – Ultima Ratio Δ Mountain of the Sun, 2017 (13:00)
Mohammad Alfaraj – Heat, 2019 (2:18)
Ahmed Isamaldin – The Resistance of the Rhizome, 2020 (5:00)
Evil Eye
Lara Khaldi (pal)
For some time now artists in the region have been thinking about and producing works around memory, archives and museums because there is a proliferation of museums here recently. These works reveal the tension between people in struggle, and private and national desires to close off and control those narratives relegating them to the past. Each video engages with a particular museum and its history and present, but what they have in common is that they reveal those struggles which the museum so adamantly tries to conceal. Whether by juxtaposing dead statues/men with the poetry of collectively/women authored stories, or sleeping and dreaming away the premises of the institution, or glaring at the museum with the evil eye lest it return looted heads to their rightful descendants, or revealing how the museum gobbles up individual histories in order to forge a history of the institution rather than the collective; all the works reveal and capture the struggle against the museum and the hegemonic discourses; patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist that it represents and proliferates. We can see in the videos the narrative of the oppressed, narratives which are alive and continue in spite deadening capture of the museum.
DINA MIMI – In order to talk with the dead
NOOR ABUARAFEH – As if I have never been in this place before
ALI CHERRI – Somniculus
JUMANA EMIL ABBOUD – I Feel Nothing
