The Sharjah Art Gallery of the American University in Cairo launches AUC_LAB, a new series of monographic exhibitions and projects by artists from the region, organized in collaboration with local partners. The first two projects in the series feature AUC graduates Malak Helmy and Hassan Khan. AUC_LAB will present an exhibition and programs with Malak Helmy and a program parallel to Hassan Khan’s solo exhibition at D-CAF Cairo. These projects are embedded into the educational framework of the American University in Cairo, one of the leading research institutions in the region.
Malak Helmy: Lost Referents of Some Attraction
Curated by Beirut
March 31–April 26, AUC Sharjah Art Gallery
For her first major solo exhibition Lost Referents of Some Attraction, Malak Helmy (b. 1982, Alexandria) reformulates a selection of her texts and recent lens-based works into a constellation of associations and forms that loosely respond to the site of the American University in Cairo’s campus in New Cairo, rendering its traits of distance, desert or mirage. An array of indexical elements in space act as placeholders and projections that revert images to texts and texts to images via a bird’s travelogue, movements in a room, and a gargling marble fountain. On April 23, a performative public program will take place at the Sharjah Art Gallery with short responses by Antonia Alampi, Brian Conley, Jens Maier-Rothe, Matthew Rana, Nile Sunset Annex, Sarah Rifky and others.
Hassan Khan exhibition
D-CAF Festival: March 30–April 26
Curated by Beth Stryker/CLUSTER
Location: Kodak Passageway, Cairo
This exhibition will present the first major survey of artist Hassan Khan’s work to be held in Egypt. While internationally celebrated, including a recent nomination for the Hugo Boss prize, and an early influence in Cairo’s independent art and music scene, the artist has never before presented such a large number of works in Egypt. Khan premiered his artwork in Cairo in 1995, and this show will feature a selection of his works from the mid-’90s to the present day.
For more information: d-caf.org/event/category/visual-arts
Footnotes to Hassan Khan
Curated by Beth Stryker/CLUSTER
March 30–April 26, various venues
Footnotes to Hassan Khan is conceived as a discursive complement to the first major survey exhibition of Hassan Khan (b. 1975) in Egypt, which will be presented in downtown Cairo’s Kodak Passage as part of D-CAF. With the exhibition providing a survey of Khan’s diverse body of work from the mid-’90s to the present day, Footnotes to Hassan Khan has been commissioned by AUC_LAB to contextualize his work in a discursive and performative form. The program includes an artist talk and a tour by Khan, as well as a talk by writer Nida Ghouse. Khan and Ghouse will conduct a seminar for AUC students based on his piece 17 and in AUC, which reflects on his student years at the American University in Cairo. The live concert Taraban will conclude the program and present a new musical work based on two early 20th-century Egyptian songs by Youssef El Manialawy.
For more information: www.sharjahgallery.org / www.d-caf.org
The Sharjah Art Gallery
The Sharjah Art Gallery is directed by Kaya Behkalam and part of the Visual Cultures program of the Department of the Arts of the American University in Cairo. The academic committee of the gallery consists of professors Kaya Behkalam, Anneka Lenssen, Shady Elnoshokaty and Ronnie Close.
For more information about the gallery and its programs, visit www.sharjahgallery.org or contact Leena Sadek at [email protected].
