Discussion between curator Ali Hussein AlAdawy with scholar Mariz Kelada, and filmmakers Maged Nader, Mohamed AbdelKarim, and Assem Hendawi.
Maged Nader, Graduated from the High Cinema Institute in Egypt in 2011. He directed several short films; including “Fathy doesn’t live here anymore”, and “Most of what Follows is true” which both premiered in Berlinale Forum Expanded, as well as some short experimental shots in 16mm and super8, through participating in Analogue workshops with Labor Berlin and other independent film labs. He worked as a Cinematographer for the feature film “Poisonous Roses” which premiered in Rotterdam film festival 2018, and “Soad” which was officially selected in Cannes 2020 and Berlinale Panorama 2021, in addition to a number of shorts and documentaries. He has participated in several panels and conferences about analogue filmmaking, cinematography and archive in Egypt, Berlin and Nigeria. He worked as the executive director of Cimatheque–The Alternative Film Centre in Cairo between 2018 to 2021.
-Mohamed Abdelkarim (1983) lives and works between Cairo, Rotterdam, and Vienna, where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Künste. Abdelkarim’s works have been included in the Sharjah Biennial 11, 2013, Guild Master of Cabaret Voltaire, Manifesta 11, 2016, Live Works Performance Act Award Vol. 5, IT, 2017 and Berlinale 72/Forum Expanded, 2022. He has also received the Prix Excellence HES-SO in Switzerland 2016, and has been shortlisted for the Henrike Grohs Art Award 2022. Abdelkarim’s practice is performance-oriented. He considers performance as a research method and a practice that reflects on performative acts such as narrating, singing, detecting, doing, fictioning, and speculating, which embody various forms across performance, installation, film, sound, paintings, and encounters. His current umbrella project focuses on the agency of the landscape as a witness to “a history we missed and a future we have not yet attended.”
Assem Hendawi (b. 1989) is an artist who mainly works with still and moving images as well as text. With a conceptual approach, Hendawi uses a visual vocabulary that addresses many different social and political issues. His works create fictional and experiential universes that only emerge bit by bit. By investigating language self-referentially, he creates intense personal moments with rules and omissions, acceptance, and refusal, which lure the viewer round and round in circles. The resulting works are deconstructed to the extent that meanings shift and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted. By merging several seemingly incompatible worlds into a new universe, he focuses on the ideas of “public space” and spaces that could be or spaces to come: the non-private space, the virtual owned space, and space that is accessible by imagination. His works are often about contact with architecture and systems. Space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes developed in absurd and abstract ways. He currently lives and works in Egypt.
Mariz Kelada: Mariz Kelada recently completed her PhD in Anthropology at Brown University and starting October 2023 she will be a EUME Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. Kelada also holds an MA in Modern Culture and Media, and the Cogut Institute Certificate in Collaborative Humanities from Brown University, as well as an MA in Sociology and Anthropology from the American University in Cairo. Her interdisciplinary research is invested in the labor and political economies of the cultural and creative sectors in Egypt and the SWANA region, political theory, and multimodal ethnographic methods. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Sociology, MERIP (the Middle East Research and Information Project), and Film and Media Studies Journal SYNOPTIQUE. Since 2010, Kelada has worked in Cairo’s cultural sector in various capacities, from project management and research to film production, and is the co-founder of Qaaf.Laam.Collective: a research and advocacy group that works on improving work environments and labor conditions of Egypt’s cultural workers.
Ali Hussein AlAdawy is a curator of film and artistic research projects, researcher, and critic. He teaches and edits sometimes, and he writes at other times. He’s interested in film, video, urban contemporary art-related practices, and modern and contemporary cultural history. He curated a number of film programs and seminars such as Labor Images (Ongoing since 2019), Serge Daney: A Homage and Retrospective (2017), and Harun Farocki: Dialectics of Images…Images that cover/uncover other images (2018). He also curated many exhibitions and public programs, for example, together with Paul Cata, the exhibition ”The Art of Getting Lost in Cities: Barcelona & Alexandria” (2017)and the seminar “Benjamin and the City”(2015). He was one of the founders of Tripod, an online magazine for film and moving images critique (2015-2017), and was part of the editorial team of TarAlbahr, an online platform and a publication for urban and art practices in Alexandria (2015-2018). Ali has also completed an MA in the intersections between Human rights and contemporary art from Bard College, New York.
