An exhibition at ARD Art Institution, Garden City, Cairo.
Curated by Farida Youssef
November 2024
In her work, affect is freed from its illusivity. It has a shape, material and body whose organic substance is alive, breathing and conscious. Its fine delicate layers gain its form power, through accumulating questions not just answers, and accumulating hesitations not just decisions. The form power of completion lies in its incompletion.
A notebook entry by rana elnemr, written after a visit to the exhibition.
Rana and Farida taught me about the meaning of AFFECT. I understand it as the perceptible manifestation of a feeling, or of a longer term, low lying emotional state of being.
.
A bridge to cross as I come to it.
Steel, wood, tissue paper, Bulbond super PVA, dog lead clasp, cotton string, sheepswool, eye swivel, nuts and bolts, climbing harness, pulleys, rope.
2022-2024
Lines that grew close to the balcony
Glass and steel wire. With thanks to the team at Khaled Ali Glass.
2023
Teenage cat.
Newsprint paper, PVA glue
2021
To make tangible objects out of the intangible. The Embraces came out of memory, the loom came out of feeling death.
From Farida Youssef’s notes, 2023.
The Embraces
Newsprint paper, PVA glue, steel.
2021 - 2019
Early in the morning, before Farida came.
Pencil on tracing paper
Ramadan 2024
The winter of Rowan and Iris
Oakbark tanned leather from Dorset, Nile clay from Al Nazla, Fayoum
Somerset, UK, 2021
Faggala tunnels
Cardboard, PVA glue, children’s projector torch, slide disks, steel
2023 - 24
Spinoza wrote that ‘each thing, as far as it lies in itself,
strives to preserve in its being.’ (Ethics, III.prop 6). He called this Conatus, Latin for striving. Papier-mâché is a material that perseveres in being papier-mâché until it gives us Embrace. More than inertia, these sculptures could exist indefinitely, lest they be disturbed by an outside force. There is also a perseverance in Faggala where all this material came from. A persistence through time and space. Workshops that have existed in the same location for generations. To think that glass has been blown here and paper made there for decades. The Faggala Conatus.
From Farida Youssef’s exhibition text
No one is made in one go.
Lead alloy (copper, lead, tin and bismuth)
2018
A head-to-toe height is a portion of space within big space. It can host any form, material or line.
From my notes, 2024.
One degree of a big circle made of what is around you.
Bronze.
2016
ود اللي في حدودي
(Dood ill lee fee hadoodee / the worm in my boundaries. )
Egyptian sheepswool, Egyptian cotton, Rose madder plant dye
2019
An animal knows how to rest.
Newsprint paper, oil pastel, pencil, other drawing materials
Fayoum, 2018.
I extend my sincere thanks to everyone who made this exhibition with me.
Farida Youssef, curator
Roshanak Zangeneh, artistic director of the film
Nour Emad, film editor
Moustafa Shaaban Abdelhamed, sound mixing
Mohamed Helmy, videographer
Aida El Oweidy, graphic designer
Norah Nagy, translator
Rana El Nimr, conversation participant
Hana el Beblawy, founder of ARD
The ARD team - Amira Elkouny, Farah El Shawarby, Youmna Swaydan, Ahmed and Khidr.
And to the photographers who captured it:
Amelie Sachs - 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11
Omar Kafrawy - 5, 7, 8, 19, 21
Roshanak Zangeneh - 9, 18
rana elnemr - 17
A deinstallation day photograph - looking in at the loom and the ladder poised to unhook her from the ceiling.