May 2014
Sharjah Art Gallery, American University in Cairo, Cairo
"Hydrogen" is the 2014 senior student exhibition of the American University in Cairo's Visual Cultures Program. The exhibition presents seventeen projects produced throughout the year and is curated by Visual Artist and AUC Professor Shady Elnoshokaty.
The theme for this year's exhibition is Hydrogen, a basic element whose transformative capacities make it the substance of the most destructive weapon humankind has created: the hydrogen bomb. But it is also a source of life—water, electricity and engine power—that materially sustain the world. It is in this sense that hydrogen intersects with the basic processes of art. Both utilize matter and medium and subject it to a drastic transformation to an extent that the basic matter is negated through the labor of the artist. Hydrogen and art meet at yet another level: they reveal the unstable nature of reality in its constant dynamic alterability, according to the exhibition's curatorial statement.
The Visual Cultures Program at The American University in Cairo offers an integrated curriculum within a liberal arts context. It combines an interdisciplinary approach to the arts with tools and methods borrowed from other disciplines such as sciences, sociology, anthropology and history. This senior year exhibition showcases one of the first outcomes of the new curriculum. Students have adopted a process-oriented conceptual approach and developed a variety of visual and performative languages in their multi-media work.
The following students took part in the exhibition: Miral Abdel Moneim, Habiba Allam, Ines Alexandra El Sayed Al Laban, Zeina Asfour, Mondow Ayoub, Marwa Benhalim, Samar El Abbasy, Leila Eleshe, Tuqa El-Harouny, Salma El-Shaffei, Doaa Gamil, Ingy Helmy, Samar Khaled, Ayette Meligy, Salma.