Out of Place By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie Curated by William Wells, the exhibition “Out
of Place” pulls together the work of nine contemporary artists
from Egypt yet dispenses with the notion that they speak for their country,
their city, or even the art space they use as a common platform for
their work. (Wells is the founder and director of Cairo’s Townhouse
Gallery of Contemporary Art, a nonprofit art space established in 1998.)
From Simon Njami’s “African Remix” to the Cairo-focused
iteration of Catherine David’s “Contemporary Arab Representations,”
he knows exhibitions based on geography will recur and isn’t interested
in adding to their project. In underlying theory and overlying practice,
“Out of Place” considers the ways in which artists substitute
one context for another to tease out new meanings and offer alternative
readings—they make the familiar strange. Tarek Zaki’s installation
of six sculptures, "Time Machine: Remembering Tomorrow," 2004,
imagines the spent remains of today’s warfare as the novel artifacts
of tomorrow’s antiquities museums. Hassan Khan’s streetwise
Plexiglas wall work from 2006—featuring eighteen three-face panels
that reveal layered images as viewers encroach upon and retreat from
the piece—considers the disjunction between an individual artwork
produced in solitude for an assumed elite and the visual energy and
density of popular culture consumed by mass audiences. Titled Automatic
Is the Voice That Speaks (and shown previously in London), Khan’s
work proposes “the sign as accident” though comics, retro
landscapes, and pages from soft-core pornography. |
