Author Archives: jolanta

Expose You, the latest sculptural series by Cao Hui, is characterized by a vivid imagery of animals like gorillas, pigs, cows, and sheep. The visual aspect of these animal sculptures have been exaggerated and magnified through impersonation, which renders the animals similar to the typical sculpture in classical art. At the same time his work […]

The life of an artist is one of constant negotiation with uncertainty. The financial market thrives on overcoming and subduing uncertainty. Throughout history, in times of global economic and social uncertainty like those we are currently undergoing, it is the creative community and individuals who are motivated to propose and work through new ideas that […]

I am constantly, in a high-and-low search for feelings for a new birth, feelings expressing me, and are expressed by me. Owning the metaphoric presence of signs, symbols, and elements constitutes the existentiality of my recollections, memory of locations and instances. These factors interact only to multiply, bind, and repel, massively, forming walls of paintings […]

Coming from a multidisciplinary background involving landscape architecture, fine arts, and theory, I work in an interdisciplinary style involving photography and installation. Identity and “land” or “landscape as subject,” and the territory where various idea battles are fought have been the primary aspects of my work. The series Genius Loci (2003, Egypt) is an investigation […]

Cairo-based artist Huda Lutfi has been excavating the bedrock of her city for years. In the public repositories of a metropolis layered with its own tangible remnants of memory, Lutfi engaged as both archaeologist and archivist, collecting and exploring with the eye and expertise of a cultural historian—her formal training—long before the artifacts found their […]

In my painting, I use imagery of body perfection, and treat them to reflect metamorphosis and the movement from one state to another. For the male figures I appropriate images of body builders, and for the female figures I use images extracted from advertising and from cheesy commercial tabloids. The images are enlarged archival color […]

Born in 1977 in Assiut, Basim Magdi lives and works in Cairo. He received his BFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University in 2000. At a time when the relevance of painting is continuously questioned, and as new mediums advance, Basim Magdi has found the means to fuse to modernism and […]

My work is an ongoing process of accumulating, interpreting, and re-interpreting my archive of images, a broken and fragmented memory, which I try to “fix.” Whilst my name “Baladi” literally means in Arabic “my country,” a lack of roots is inherent to my identity. This absence, or perhaps abundance, of roots is at the core […]

Sebastiano Mauri Sebastiano Mauri lives and works between Buenos Aires and Milan. The concern for identity is present throughout his work. From the different artistic approaches and techniques he uses—painting, photography, and video—Mauri makes us think about the prejudices that affect us, in an almost automatic way, and dangerously limit us in our way of […]

Arab zones really do seem to be very “hot” at the moment. Not just because of war, occupation, and the clashes between the Palestinians and Israelis in the Gaza Strip, which dramatically marked the beginning of 2009 with the death of over 1,200 people, but also, fortunately, in a more positive sense, because warmth and […]