ROTATING EXHIBITION ROOM

The Rotating Exhibition Room has been curated as part of the Fak’ugesi Festival 2016. It is a curated rotating exhibition featuring video works from a variety of artists. They address topics around displacement, order and chaos, ownership and belonging with the digital and technological. The videos for each session will be screened continuously throughout the designated days allowing for drop in viewings.

The Rotating Exhibition Room is being held in partnership with Fak’ugesi’s Egyptian sister festival Cairotronica held in May 2016. Cairotronica is a Symposium of Electronic and New Media arts. It includes a program of activities, exhibitions, talks, workshops and screenings by local, regional, and international artists as well as academics, and technology experts.

Artwork Screening Program:

Session 1: 19^th – 21^st August 2016

• Staging the City (2014-2015) by MAGDALENA KALLENBERGE

Session 2: 22^nd – 24^th August 2016

• Think tank (2015) by Ahmed Elshaer
• Alphanbet (2014) by MOHAMED ALLAM
• Falling.Empires (2015) by CARLY WHITAKER
• ARID by 3rd year Students from The Animation School
• Disarming by 3rd year Students from The Animation School

Session 3: 25^th – 27^th August 2016

• BABY COME HOME (2016) by FOUNDLAND – GHALIA ELSRAKBI & LAUREN ALEXANDER

 Session 4: 29^th – 31^st August 2016

• Think tank (2015) by Ahmed Elshaer
• Alphanbet (2014) by MOHAMED ALLAM
• Falling.Empires (2015) by CARLY WHITAKER
• ARID by 3rd year Students from The Animation School
• Disarming by 3rd year Students from The Animation School

About the Artworks:

Staging the City (2014-2015) by MAGDALENA KALLENBERGE

Staging the City – Cairo Cinemagraphs consists of a series of composited cinemagraphs in different areas of Cairo. In these composed urban panoramas, Magdalena singles out one individual movement, which is repeated indefinitely thanks to the Cinemagraph technique. Most of the looped movements represent working processes, such as hand movements and gestures of communication; but she is also interested in waiting postures. Waiting is one of the Cairene’s favourite ways to pass time. And Magdalena has been fascinated by waiting postures ever since reading Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In the streets of Cairo, people standing or sitting somewhere without doing anything obvious are omnipresent. Maybe they are waiting for something, maybe they are waiting for nothing; time just passes and things happen in-between. These captures are the non-functionalist, non-productive nature of ‘waiting’, which we in the capitalist west have demonised to such a degree that it seems to us ‘absurd’. ‘Doing nothing’ is almost unheard of in the productive, industrialised global North. Hence, also this absurdity of ‘Doing nothing’ versus ‘Doing something’ in a Sisyphus-like manner adds a surrealist nature to the images. In the other scenes Magdalena focuses on analog Barthes‘ concept of the punctum on an affective detail, that she single out and embed it as a looping element within the composited still image. This element can be a fraction of a working process, a single hand movement, a little gesture within a conversation, anything that is able to establish a direct relationship to the person and holds our gaze without condescending to mere meaning or beauty.

Magdalena Kallenberger, born in the south of Germany, is a Cairo based visual artist and filmmaker working with photography and video. She studied in Furtwangen, Würzburg, Rotterdam and Berlin, where she graduated with a first class diploma and was awarded with a Meisterschülerdegree in Klasse Medienkunst at the University of the Arts Berlin. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally and was awarded with prizes and several grants by the DAAD German Academic Council, Senate of Berlin, Forum Transregionale Studien and Elsa Neumann Scholarship (NaFoeG). She is an active member of Cairo Bats, a collective of female artists based in Cairo and founding member of “100 Best Arabic Posters”. Since 2010 she holds a lecturer position (media conception and film) at the German University in Cairo and got appointed Head of Media Design Department in 2015.

Think tank (2015) by AHMED ESHER

My project Think Tank is Inspired by project for Artist Josef Delapp Over the course of 26 days, from March 12 – April 6, 2008, using a treadmill customized for cyberspace, He reenacted Mahatma Gandhi famous 1930 Salt March, He walked the entire 240 miles of the original march in real life and online in Second Life, in my video project Gandhi didn’t leave Virtual life he Continue in the virtual world from game to another and the capabilities of the game characters and wait to the one who lead the expected peaceful change.

Born in 1981, Ahmed El Shaer is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans the mediums of installation, photography, sound and video, with a particular interest in digital technologies. His videos combine Machinima, stock footage, 3D animation and experimental soundscapes. His work has been highlighted in numerous exhibitions and festivals, among which: 56th Venice Biennale, “In the Eye of the Thunderstorm” Collateral Event, Curated by: Martina Corgnati, Venice, Italy. “Experiments in Arab Cinema” at (Simon Fraser University) “SFU”, Vancouver, Canada, 2013 and (Rochester University) New York, USA, 2014. Bamako Biennale, Bamako National Museum, Bamako, Mali (2011). He is the recipient of numerous awards and has participated in several residency programs, such as: Cite International D’Art Invited by Institut Francais, Paris-France 2016. Art Omi Artist-in-Residence New York, USA, the Pro Helvetia Artist-in-Residence cycle (Zurich, Switzerland, 2009) and the Summer Academy of Fine Arts (Salzburg, Austria, 2006 and 2007).

Alphanbet (2014) by MOHAMED ALLAM

The “alphabet” suggests the beginning of a long learning process, the basis for communication. And here we learn the “recipe” for a homemade bomb, performed in the manner of a typical cooking show by a masked man. It is a simple, tonguein-cheek gesture, which is complicated by the action unfolding in the paradisal landscape, and the iconic music of Gheorghe Zamfir, repeatedly played in international blockbuster dramas, but also as a filler against footage of blooming flowers.

Mohamed Allam is a visual artist, born in Assiut in 1984. Allam studied at the Arts Education Faculty of Helwan University in Cairo. He now lives and works in Cairo using different mediums such as video, performance and sound usually the surrounding environment with its social and political constituents which provides the context and framework from which he focuses on the derivation of irony in his work. He attempts from these elements to link his cultural roots to a wider arrangement of networks.He has participated as an artist in numerous events since 2003. Allam is also concerned with art management and has participated in organizing several art events in Cairo. He established the young Cairo-based artist initiative ”Medrar for Contemporary Art ” which aims at the promotion of contemporary artistic practices of young artists in Egypt.

Falling.Empires (2015) by CARLY WHITAKER

//fallen empires/ex colonies [ who are they? where are they ] // dictators – who dictate <who speak> it’s a war out there :: we’re all fighting //a domain // a kingdom // a superpower _________ register it_______own it.it’s mine                 [ no one else can have it]     [ it’s all about the geography man ] where is it? can you get there? “BORDERS” fallen // fallen empires/states     fallen:territory/domain – the net:: it’s mine / it’s yours || way out [speak____taste___repeat_____repeat]

falling.empires examines who owns the Internet and the truth around ownership on the net. The internet can be perceived as territory, as a space which we all access but is often owned by another nation or entity and in turn then controlled. This control often extends as far as the content that is presented to us. falling.empires is a series of gifs starts a conversation around these ideas in a humorous manner hoping to find a few answers about the internet is.

Carly Whitaker is an emerging digital practitioner based in Johannesburg, South Africa who specialises in digital interactive media. She is an artist, researcher and lecturer. She completed her BA Fine Arts (Honours) in 2008 and then went on to do her MA in Digital Interactive Media (with distinction) 2012, both completed at Wits University in Johannesburg. Having lectured at a variety of institutions such as Vega and Wits University she is currently based full time at the Open Window Institute in the Interaction Arts department. Her research, curatorial and creative practices are all connected and related. Through her work Carly engages in a constant exploration of how we communicate through media and the ways we use technology to create dialogues between ourselves and our environments. In doing so, she addresses contemporary online culture and urbanism as well as the interaction of fashion, craft and technology.

ARID by 3rd year Students from The Animation School

A boy and his bull companion travel across the arid African landscapes in search of a safe refuge. Within the beauty of surreal landscapes lurks dangers they&#39;ll soon have to face.

Arid was created by a team of six during our final year at The Animation School in Cape Town. Arid was the first South African student animation to make it into the official selection at the Annecy Animation Festival in 2016 and is the proud winner of two gold medals at The New York Festivals in 2016.

Disarming by 3rd year Students from The Animation School

Two robots pass each other on a factory floor. One doesn’t recognise Two, but Two sure recognises One. Two’s wild slaps of greeting soon result in major damage to One who, as soon as he is able, strikes Two a resounding blow on the dome. A fight ensues that sees both robots use each other’s disembodied arms as swords, battering rams and thumb war weapons. The clash leaves them both armless. They resort to kicks, but their legs are too short for them to deal any damage to each other and they are forced to leave. Their arms follow obediently.

The Flying Circus is an animation studio based in Johannesburg that utilises a state-of-the-art Motion Capture system as one of their primary production tools. This process allows for a unique performance-driven production method that is biased towards a director-actor driven style. Multiple actor performances are captured simultaneously – including face, body, hands and voice – offering a high degree of spontaneity. Disarming’s creators/creative directors are Ronald Henry and it was written by Daniel Buckland and James Cairns.

BABY COME HOME (2016) by FOUNDLAND – GHALIA ELSRAKBI & LAUREN ALEXANDER

In 2016 Foundland was commissioned to reinterpret the renowned internet artwork by Olia Lialina made in 1996 called, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War. The new appropriation of this artwork, takes the narrative content of Lialina’s original work as starting point and extends the idea of an estranged conversation caused by the complexity of conflict. Foundland created a video work comprising of a series of chats between a mother and her radicalised son, who left the Western world to join a Jihadi fighting force. Their strained and clumsy conversation is captured across many media platforms, over time. Neither is sure who is listening or who is answering. His seduction into conflict is likely born out of social media and then ironically his mother has no choice but to desperately search Youtube videos to spot her son in the background.

Video work was commissioned for the retrospective exhibition and the 20th anniversary of the Internet artwork My Boyfriend Came Back From The War (MBCBFTW) by Olia Lialina, curated

by Annet Dekker at MU in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, February 2016.

Foundland Collective is an art, design and research collective, initiated in 2009 by Lauren Alexander and Ghalia Elsrakbi and based between Cairo and Amsterdam. The collaboration was initiated out of a common desire to analyze, translate, visualize, contextualize and intervene on an artistic and intellectual level with urgent, complex social and political systems that exist around us, specifically from our position as non-Western citizens living between the Middle East and Europe. In 2015, Foundland was awarded the Smithsonian artist research fellowship and were nominated for the oldest Dutch art award, called the Prix de Rome.