EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY EGYPTIAN ARTISTS, “SHIFTING BORDERS”
EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY EGYPTIAN ARTISTS
“SHIFTING BORDERS”
coordinator: Ahmed Helmy
Exhibition:
9 – 15.02.2016
Opening:
8.02.2016, 5 p.m.
Centre for Creative Activities / ul. Gen. Zaruskiego 1a /Ustka
Documentation
SHIFTING BORDERS
We first met in February 2015 through a project organized by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and involving over 100 Egyptian artists in a month-long trip along the Nile to realize new artworks. This project, titled “North and South”, brought us together as a group of 12 artists despite our differences in age, experience and background. It triggered aspects of self and mutual discovery; throughout the month, the field visits, screenings, discussions and brainstorming sessions we had allowed for examining borders within and between ourselves as separate entities. Hence, the idea of “Shifting Borders” came up as a common theme of interest among us: how we as individual artists and as a group work in flux, constructing and deconstructing something in between. The twelve of us have stayed in touch since; we want to examine this situation again and present different points of view through visual narration and different mediums. We believe a second gathering is needed to develop and realize our projects; and Poland would be an ideal place for such a gathering to discover the concept of borders that change and expand according to human mobility, examine how geographic and political boundaries affect the concept of our existence, how values define identities, how difficult it is to negotiate values when in conflict and explore the imaginative possibilities of shifting borders, the middle zone (the unstable space that exists in between) where influences merge and different cultural traditions co-exist in ways that seem to cancel their disparity. During our visit, each one of us will consider his personal definition of the term “shifts” and his perception of “borders” as a subject for his artistic approach, as well as a distinct way to reflect his mental ideology. Are we ready for a change? That is the question we would like to answer with 12 experimental group of work entitled “Shifting Borders”.