This week is full of gallery openings and festival launches, dance, film and visual arts. But there’s also a night of Sudanese folk music by songstress Asia Madani and her band at Cairo’s Room Art Space, and if you’re around Alexandria this weekend, which we strongly recommend as the Nassem al-Raqs festival starts on Thursday, you can also catch two short films by young Egyptian director Naji Ismail at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
This participatory exhibition sees tech collective and Townhouse neighbor Cairo Hackerspace collaborating with gallery visitors to translate ideas, problems or feelings into physical form. Describing itself as “an invitation to think in 3D,” the collective hopes to use 3D printers, VR headsets and sensors to create objects and models that question the relationship between art and technology. Cairo Hackerspace’s engineers will be in the gallery space from 4 – 8 pm daily.
7pm, April 30, Townhouse Gallery, Factory Space, 6 Nabrawy street, downtown Cairo. Opening hours: 4 – 8pm daily. More information here.
Zawya cinema is on Easter break, so it’s lucky that cinema-goers in Cairo and Alexandria have a treat provided by the Goethe Institut. Goethe’s annual event brings a selection of recent festival-hopping German and Arabic films to their screens in Cairo and Alexandria. Those who didn’t catch Maren Ade’s award winning Toni Erdman at the Cairo International Film Festival last November will have a chance to catch it, along with Mahmoud Sabbagh’s Saudi romcom Barakah Meets Barakah. Other exciting titles include Me and Kaminsky by Wolfgang Becker (Goodbye Lenin!) and Marouan Omara and Islam Kamal’s One Plus One Makes a Pharoah’s Chocolate Cake, which premiered at the Berlinale in February.
May 2 – 9. Goethe Institut Cairo: 17 Hussein Wassef St, Medan al-Mesaha, Dokki, Giza. Goethe Institut Alexandria: 10 Batalsa Street, Azzarita, Alexandria. Free. More information here.
The fourth and final chapter of the Contemporary Image Collective’s exhibition series, If Not For That Wall, which has stretched over the past two years, includes three artworks by Egyptian artists Ala Younis, Hossam Ali and Maha Maamoun, and one by Palestinian artist due Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. There are also discussions, artist talks and film screenings. While previous chapters dealt more overtly with imprisonment, constraints and incarceration, this chapter traces desire and defeat in national liberation movements across Egypt and the region. The exhibition aims to question how the display of historical material in museums constructs national narratives, while the parallel program discusses alternative ways of producing and watching films in moments of social upheaval, from the 1960s to the recent Arab revolutions.
From the previous chapter of If Not for That Wall. Courtesy: Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh and Rozenn Quéré/CIC - Courtesy: Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh and Rozenn Quéré/CIC
7 pm, May 3, CIC, 22 Abdelkhalek Tharwat street, downtown Cairo, 4th floor. Open daily 12pm – 9pm (except Friday). More information here.
The seventh edition of Alexandria’s favorite contemporary dance festival takes over this week with various site specific performances. Activating various public and abandoned spaces around the city with performance, Momkin – espaces depossibles and NOUT for Art and Media Production present this year’s Nassim al-Raqs, and performers include Olivier Dubois, Mohamed Fouad, Ici Meme and Ex Nihilo.
May 4, various locations, Alexandria. More information here.
