Selected curatorial projects. Please click links for full documentation, and apologies for the state of the page as I build it.
Hydrarchy
Co-curated with Anna Colin, a Disclosures project
Gasworks and UCL, London September 2010
CIC, Cairo December 2011
Still from 'Hydra Decapita', 2010, by the Otolith Group
Uriel Orlow, 'The Short and the Long of it (v.10)' shown at Gasworks, 2010
Hydrarchy is a two-phase project taking the form of exhibitions and conferences, which approach historical and contemporary examinations of the sea, the ship, and the offshore as remarkable and contested cultural, political, legal and socio-economic territories. While the London project traced a connecting path starting with the common sailor of the 18th Century Atlantic and branching out to the contemporary global economy; the Cairo project will, broadly speaking, conceptualise the Mediterranean Basin, the Suez Canal, and the broader North African context in contemporary postcolonial geopolitics.
Exhibiting artists: Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Ayed Arafah, Goldin+Senneby, Laura Horelli, Melanie Jackson, Bouchra Khalili, Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Paul McCarthy, Uriel Orlow, Otolith Group, Femmy Otten, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Xaviera Simmons, Take To The Sea, João Pedro Vale, Lawrence Weiner.
Conference contributors: Shaina Anand & Ashok Sukumaran (camp), Amy Balkin, Angus Cameron, Iain Chambers, Annie Rebekah Gardner & Kelsy Yeargood, Lisa Lefeuvre, Marcus Rediker, Take To The Sea.
Propaganda By Monuments
Co-curated with Clare Butcher at CIC
March 2011
Poster design by Aya Tarek for Propaganda by Monuments
Taking its inspiration and title from a satirical short story by the South African writer Ivan Vladislavić, in which a South African businessman attempts to buy Leninist monuments from postcommunist Russia for refashioning into new heroes for post-Apartheid South Africa. Propaganda By Monuments was an exhibition, publication and events programme that looked at the unexpected roles of nostalgia and cultural transfer in the (re)construction of societies. The publication presented new essays as well as the first translation of the story into Arabic.
Exhibiting artists: Hasan & Hosain Essop, Angela Ferreira, Dan Halter, Runa Islam, Iman Issa, Ahmed Kamel, Kiluanji Kia Henda.
Screenings and texts: Amy Halliday, Ivan Vladislavić, Fernando Sanchez Castillo, David Maljković.
The Alternative News Agency
CIC, November 2010
Cover design and layout by Shennawy
Inside view including portrait by Karim Mansour
The ANA was a project aimed at creating an experimental and diverse criticality towards the role of photojournalism, through inviting junior photojournalists; artists working in photography; and activists/bloggers; to an intense workshop and discussion phase. The participants were then asked to create photo stories in response to the November 2010 Egyptian Parliamentary Elections, interpreting this as widely as they liked. In order to avoid performatively validating the act of ‘voting day’, and to refocus in on underlying issues, participants were required to hand in their stories the day before the elections.
From this group, eight stories were created, and made into a bilingual publication. Stories took numerous approaches and covered topics such as the environmental decay of Nile Delta villages; the use of public parkland in Cairo; and the repetitive graphic style of election campaign posters.
Photographers: Shady El Mashak, Karim Mansour, Shaimaa Ashour, Abdulrahman Mansour, Amira Mortada, Moustafa ElShandawely, Mohamed Ezz Eldin, and Mohamed Eid.
The Paper Trail
Residency and solo exhibition of Francesc Ruiz at CIC, October 2010
Exhibition view, 'The Paper Trail', 2010
Issue 1 of 'The Green Detour', Francesc Ruiz 2010
Francesc Ruiz’ practice physically intersects fictional narratives with the urban structures and social settings they refer to. Much of his work starts from the possibilities of the comic book, a fascination that stems from their capacity for illicit circulation; their role in social commentary; their supposedly lowbrow status; and the possibilities of visual narrative.
In April 2010 I invited Ruiz on residency at CIC, to developing new works for an exhibition in October. Newsstand was a recreation of a Cairo newsstand, in which the stones that typically hold down the newspapers began to have their own conversations. The Green Detour was a nine-issue comic book that appropriated four familiar characters from Egyptian comic book history, and set them on an existential tour of the city, looking for themselves in today’s Egypt. While the first issue could be picked up at CIC, and readers had to follow the characters on their fictional wanderings across Downtown Cairo in order to find the distribution point of the next issue.
Disclosures
Co-curated with Anna Colin
Gasworks and various offsite venues
Flyer for 'Declose' by the Open Music Archive (2008)
Disclosures was a two-day conference, and commissioning and events programme that scrutinised the notion of openness across fields of cultural production at large. The project looked at the parallel ambitions of Free/Libre and Open Source production and artistic production that seeks to emancipate the maker and/or user, questioning constructions of authorship, copyright, and digitized distribution across both fields. As well as the conference, the project included commissions such as Declose: a DJ scratch tool made entirely from out-of-copyright samples (Open Music Archive), and Pipeline*I, a digital interface for sharing of curatorial materials (Electronest)
Contributors: agency, Saul Albert, Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran (CAMP), Petra Bauer, llze Black, Critical Practice, Emily Druiff, Mai Abu ElDahab & Francis McKee, Electronest, Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque, Goldin+Senneby, Adnan Hadzi, Tsila Hassine, Tim Jones, Marysia Lewandowska, Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre and Kelly Foster, Marcel Mars, Armin Medosch, Micropolitics Research Group, Rodrigo Nunes, Tony Nwachukwu and Gavin Alexander (Burntprogress), Toni Prug, Oliver Ressler, Simon Sheikh, Eileen Simpson & Ben White (Open Music Archive), The People Speak, Marina Vishmidt
