We are now able to announce the dates of The Liquid Continent Exhibition in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The exhibition will be open from the 18th March, running until the 7th April. There will be a private view to accompany the literary workshop on the evening of the 21st March. Further information will follow.
Monday, 21 February 2011
Saturday, 19 February 2011
Listening and Looking Venice, Andrea Fincato, 2010
excerpt from Listening and Looking Venice
by Andrea Fincato
Venice, 2010
Monday, 7 February 2011
Istanbul Monday 13th December
Bringing together the images for the exhibition, I keep seeing these bright plastic plates and thinking of Gulen in Istanbul. On my last morning there, I had been filming in the morning by Galata Bridge and the fishmongers. It had been snowing that morning, I waited for her a few minutes early, watching a cat and seagull walk over the tarpaulin roofs of the fish stands side by side.
She arrived, and asked if I had eaten. I said yes, but I would happily eat again, and so we walked past the fishmongers and past the stand at the end with the blue buckets spinning and round to another restaurant, the closest to the water, and through a small garden into an area covered with plastic sheeting and a greeting by her friend. We sat down at a far table, and a metal basin on small legs full of hot coals was placed underneath the table next to our feet, for the first few minutes too hot for our legs to stay next to. Soon a ring of cats surrounded our feet, lying with their heads towards the heat, and one on my knee too, asleep and unmovable. First, a bottle of raki, a bottle of water and an orange bowl of ice cubes, because today we are eating fish and talking, and then a yellow plate each, with fried sprats and salad, and another clear plastic bowl of carrots and beetroot and lemon. We talked for several hours, with the hot cats and water beside us, about getting lost in the jungle, earthquakes and dancing, our families, and the same place we were sitting and how it would be in the summertime. We left, I had to catch the plane, and I walked up to the top of the hill to get the metro, and realised I was still carrying Gulen’s yellow umbrella.
Friday, 4 February 2011
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Agnieszka Dobrowolska
b.Warsaw, Poland
Lives and Works in Cairo
Agnieszka Dobrowolska is an architect who has been living and working in Egypt for seventeen years, and the head of ARCHINOS architectural practice. She designs buildings, interiors, museum displays and exhibitions, and conserves historic buildings. She also authored a number of books and articles on subjects related to Egypt. She designed The Liquid Continent exhibition, which ARCHINOS produced.
Nicholas Woodsworth’s Mediterranean Trilogy struck a chord in me. In the books, I could find my own thoughts and ideas about the Mediterranean cities given a voice in an eloquent and witty way. I wanted to share this vision with even more people than the readers of the books, and I was very happy to find donors who found it important enough to make it possible through this exhibition.
Andrea Fincato
b.1982, Vicenza
lives and works in Venice.
Andrea Fincato is an electronic media artist. His work aims to translate emotions and searches for new means of communication through new media technologies. He works primarily with sound, video and installation, using tools such as code-writing and strategies of observation and conversation to consider emotions inherent to structures and destruction.
During my final period in Alexandria, I want to approach the Liquid Continent as if it were an island. Try to imagine. The Mediterranean Sea becomes ground. The land that surrounds it becomes the sea. Everyone will go to the island to save themselves: A new land, a new opportunity to realise the ancient sentiment of unity. Many years ago the sea was a great meeting point, where everyone were equals. They faced waves, wind, dangers. Civilizations change. Differences vanish. For me the Liquid Continent mean this.
My artwork aims to offer a different perspective of Venice. Forgetting the familiarity of the city and returning to the essence, the water. The same that washes Alexandria and Istanbul.
Burak Dikilitaş
b.1988 Izmir, Turkey
Lives and worksin Istanbul.
Dikilitaş works primarily with photography, video and installation. Much of his work is concerned with the exploration of changing urban landscapes and photographic realities. Travel greatly informs his practice, and his discoveries are fed by literature, music and visual identities of his surroundings. Furthermore he is workingon a science-fiction novel. Dikilitaş is a student of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. For the past several years he has studied numerous photography techniques, and has worked with Hong Kong photographer Stanley Wong and participated in the 10th Encounter of the Mediterrenean Art Schools Daily Sounds Workshop, directed by Rémi Adjiman.
My work is trying to show regeneration of urban landscapes and is a representation of unconscious metamorphosis
Gaia Zuffa
b. 1987, Verona
lives and works inVerona
Gaia Zuffa’s relationship with photography began in elementary school when she was given a Kodak Instamatic, resulting in pinhole photographs of her classmates. Later she enrolled at the Art Institute of Verona in the departments of Architecture and Furnishings, and continuing to photograph her classmates and their works. After graduation she began to exhibit these works (Biennale of Contemporary Photography and Video, Alessandria, 2008 and Biennial of Young Italian Photographers in Bibbiena, 2010). She continues to photograph and collaborates with The Pavan Architecture Studio in Verona.
Rare are the moments in history when a thread joins the countries that border the Mediterranean: A crossroads of cultures, religions and languages.The existing amalgamation that pervades the entire Mediterranean area has been based on agricultural and trade. This gradually disappeared with the advent of industrial developments, and even further within our increasingly technological society.
Throughout this project we can demonstrate, utilising these new technologies, that the liquid continent still exists. We can learn of our neighbours and what they do at the end of this sea. We can ensure that what is happening here is known elsewhere and prove that even now a strong bond unites the populations who border this sea.
Jan Dobrowolski
b. 1984 Warsaw, Poland
Lives and Works in Glasgow and Cairo
Jan Dobrowolski is an architect and a filmmaker. His work revolves around the practice of autonomous urban realities within the wider context of the modern city. His thinking is influenced by having grown up in Cairo, the city’s many faces serving as an influence on understanding the workings, and possibilities, of a metropolis. The Cairene quarter of Bulaq is currently the subject of an ongoing project. Dobrowolski is presently based in Glasgow, finalising his Masters degree at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, from where he is scanning the horizons for a next city to live in.
A street. Admired or despised, imagined or negated? A city of many. Moving towards a past, towards a vision – or simmering in a broth of individual desire? The elusive thin line towards the other, a barrier or a bridge, says it all. But it only sp
eaks to one at one time.
Jarosław Dobrowolski
b. Warsaw, Poland
Lives and Works in Cairo
Jarosław Dobrowolski is a conservation architect living and working in Egypt for over seventeen years. He has been the technical director of the American Research Center in Egypt’s conservation programme since 1996. He published a book of his line drawings of Cairo in addition to authoring and co-authoring other publications on subjects related to Egypt.
My drawing teacher pointed out to me in 1975 that one looks at buildings and streets differently when one records them on paper in a drawing. Ever since, my drawing pad accompanied me to very different towns. Buildings don’t speak aloud, but they have a lot to say about the spirit of their cities. Trying to capture the spirit of the Liquid Continent in drawings for this exhibition was both a challenge and a great pleasure.
Jasmina Metwaly
b. 1982 Warsaw, Poland
Lives and works in Cairo
Completed MA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland in 2006, followed by a Postgraduate Diploma at the Byam Shaw School of Art at Central Saint Martins. She works predominantly with video and performance.
A constant starting point for my artistic action is a belief that reality relies on an idea that the world stands on an objective fundament and one needs to remove the illusion to reach it. My current work is time-based with strong correlations and cross references to painting. As of most recently, I’m working on a series of raw (body) records that relate to short moments-breaths shot in different landscapes. By treating the image in fragments, I dis-integrate the original information from its political, historical or geographical background and position myself within a new surrounding. An intentional juxtaposition of information occurs allowing me to move freely from one context and another creating new meanings or understanding of the recording. The result is the work itself. Eventually, I elect to evolve some of these works by video projection in a site-specific area. Whether it’s a projection of raw footage, or an edited (reconstructed) material I turn my resources into visual aids for the unspoken.
Laura Fiorio,
b.1985, Verona, Italy
Lives and works in Venice
Since 2004 Fiorio has worked in the fie
lds of photography, video and graphic art while also collaborating in the organisation of cultural events. From 2008 to 2009 she studied in London at the Middlesex University and worked as an assistant photographer in the Park Royal Studios.
I’ve been collaborating in the Liquid Continent Project for its importance in the concept of mixing cultures: in Europe, especially in Italy at the moment we are living a political era in which “the other” scares: immigration laws are becoming stricter and racism is growing.Only knowing different cultures we can realise they’re not so different at all and this exhibition can be a clue towards this thesis.
Lindsay Sekulowicz
b.1984 Cape Town, South Africa
lives and works in London
For the past several years Sekulowicz has worked with several museums, including Natural History Museums in London and Florence, and has previously accompanied Museo Zoologia "La Specola" di Firenze on two entomological expeditions. She works with drawing, sculpture, text and video, and her work is usually research-based and frequently engages with objects and archives.
Regarding the Liquid Continent project, I wished to explore personal and social approaches to time and place within a specific context, the sense of identity that results from arbitrary encounters of geography and culture and develop observations that allow for calculated chance as a format for storytelling.
Mona Magdi Kenawy
b. 1969 Alexandria, Egypt
lives and works in Alexandria
Mona Magdi Kenawy is a mosaic artist. She is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Alexandria, and also a tutor at numerous mosaic and collage workshops, including The Liquid Continent Mosaic Workshop in September 2010. The technique of glass production used in mosaics was transferred from Alexandria to Italy in the Roman Era. There has always been a strong relation between the three ancient capitals of glass mosaic: Alexandria, Constantinople and Venice, and the workshop was developed in order to make a contemporary revival of the connection between these ancient Mediterranean cultural capitals. Kenawy is a member of several international artists associations, and in 2004 published a Phd thesis under the title "Pattern in Islamic Murals- A Contemporary Vision ".
I think that the art of Mosaic is related to a deep inner sense... “spiritual” in other words, so a mosaic artist has to understand how to reach its unlimited capabilities. While constructing surfaces and contemplating its aspects and by finding variations through experimentation inside this world; a mosaic artist understands both wisdom and unrevealed knowledge related to technique and material.
Thus, in my works of mosaic, the plastic structure of stones results in unexpected meanings by combining opposites; by relating the big pieces to the small ones, the ordinary and the unordinary, the opaque and the shiny in order to expand the use of the traditional shape which ruled for several centuries within mosaics.
Salma Ahmed
b. Alexandria, Egypt
lives and works in Alexandria
Salma Ahmed is currently a student at The Faculty of Fine Arts of Alexandria. She is a painter who explores traditional painting techniques and considerations of partial- abstraction.
I am interested in abstract Alexandria in my work and in representing Alexandria's artistic culture to the nations of the Mediterranean.
Ugo Carmeni
b.1976 Conegliano, Italy
lives and works in Venice
Ugo Carmeni’s work investigates the nature of visual perception and its methodology regarding visual representation of space and movement. Recently, in cooperation with the Egyptian Museum in Turin, he has focused his research on that issue in relation to Ancient Egypt. He works primarily with photography as a means and expression of his research.
"Like the water flowing, we are travelers in search of the sea"
J. B. Gadea
Welcome
Welcome to The Liquid Continent, a space for us to show images, introduce participating artists, and open up dialogue around the project. It may also become a space for ideas, drawings, writing, and thoughts that we wish to share, reflecting on what The Liquid Continent means to us at this time…
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