REFERENCES
Artists Activating the Archive
December 2013 - January 2014
Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo
References—a group exhibition recently held at the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo—presents four artistic projects that were developed over a year using research and archival processes. Nada Shalaby’s You and I and Time is Long, for example, assembles a collection of images and texts inspired by the archaeological site of Tel el Yehudiya. Shalaby’s archive presents multiple accounts of the ancient site, weaving political, social, historical, and imaginary narratives. In Aliaa Salah’s Lines in the Sea, the local newspaper becomes a site where the personal and political implications of territorial and economic claims in the eastern Mediterranean are played out.
Also included are Drawing On A Nude Body, a collaborative project by Mariam Elias and Marwa El Shazly that revisits the Faculty of Fine Arts at Helwan University and examines the drawing studio as a place where the changing politics of art education, aesthetic renewal, and cultural hegemony are recorded in the act of drawing. Finally, Amado Alfadni’s Black Holocaust Museum imagines a museum for the largely forgotten Herero and Namaqua Genocide in modern day Namibia, which served as a model for Hitler's attempted extermination of European Jews.
References is curated by Egyptian artist Hala Elkoussy and Swiss artist Uriel Orlow. In this video, Elkoussy explains the development of the exhibition and its various projects.