Participating artists:

Mrs. Heba Mohamed (Cairo) Mrs. Rana Samir (Cairo)

Mrs. Sanabel Gabr (Cairo) Mr. Omar Abd El-Baky (Cairo) Mrs. Grit Aulitzky (Dresden) Mrs. Layla Nabi (Dresden) Mrs. Gabriela Kobus (Leipzig) Mr. Konrad Hanke (Leipzig)

Curators: Team StudioKhana:

Mrs. Iman Nabil (Cairo) Mrs. Huda Zikry (Cairo) Mr. Amr Amer (Cairo)

Exhibition views photographed by Gustav Franz.

StudioKhana for Contemporary Art is an Egyptian artist collective founded in 2012 with the aim of filling the gaps in the infrastructure of the contemporary art scene, promoting critical and educational needs, and providing various archival and educational materials for Arabic speakers. Over the past five years, the group has been committed to providing an open space for an independent program of study to support and facilitate cultural production and artistic practices across a range of disciplines and media. The focus is primarily on strengthening the conceptual and cognitive aspects of young artists and art students. In addition to organising and curating collective art exhibitions in collaboration with locally and internationally known and established artists, discussions are encouraged on issues that affect us in the contemporary world.

In her artistic work, project initiator and artist Gabriela Kobus moves between architectural, urban planning and sociological concerns, using different media.

Her focus is on the urban structures of megacities, especially the unplanned growth of informal settlements, shanty towns and slums that can be found in all urban centres worldwide. The formal aspects of a megacity as a huge, sprawling structure beyond human measure interest her just as much as the city as a foundation of social life, closely linked to the needs of its inhabitants.

With the term "amusement park", she picks up on the human need for distraction, escape from everyday life and pleasure - independent of individual circumstances.

Amusement park refers to an artificially created world of experience that forms a contrast to everyday life, while slum stands for everyday life under very specific circumstances. She sees the combination of "amusement park in slum" as an unwieldy field that raises questions about absurdity, pathos and dubious ideas of charity. In this way, she wants to open up an experimental thinking space in which contradictions and questions are to be illuminated and both thematic fields are to be explored.

What artistic considerations can be linked to this?

What focal points will the participants develop for themselves in their artistic contributions?

INFORMAL CITY PARK aims to develop into a project of many artists, bringing together participants from different backgrounds, countries of origin and age groups. After a solo exhibition in which she showed her first approach in the form of installation sketches at Lindenow #13 in Leipzig, she would like to continue the project in a next step with the now planned collaboration.

Both slums and the large-scale theme parks can be seen as systems in which large crowds of people move around in a limited space. In the informal settlements, the spatial and economic manifestations appear structureless and the people left to their own devices. In theme parks, the space is in some cases regulated down to the smallest detail in terms of design and economy, and the crowds are carefully controlled.

Often these systems are located in the periphery outside the urban infrastructure. Demarcation plays a more or less obvious role.

A look at amusement parks in different neighbourhoods within cities can also be interesting. With changes in the structure of a city, questions emerge about changes in existing amusement parks, for example from formal to informal. How does this affect the structure of the space and the psychology of the people who interact with it? What changes in function follow the change in form and to what extent does a hybrid space with new functions emerge at the edge of these amusement parks?

Cairo

For her artistic work, Cairo represents a highly interesting city. Overall, all facets between luxury and slum are present in Cairo. The rapid growth of the megacity manifests itself in diverse processes. In the city centre, countless building projects are being implemented, while at the same time entire neighbourhoods are becoming orphaned or decaying, including the centrally located "Old Cairo". It can be observed how informal settlements and slums are being demolished on a large scale; as a result, new slums are growing and existing ones are becoming denser. Some resettlement program are being implemented. In the outskirts, there are huge housing estates in various stages of construction, shell buildings dominate the picture. The largest new construction project in the Cairo metropolitan region is "New Cairo" and is to be understood literally: A new planned city. Many of the neighbourhoods with villa-style houses are already occupied, commercial complexes and shopping malls have opened.

During her last stay in Cairo, she met with the invited Cairo artists and the StudioKhana team. She presented the venture and initial thoughts on the subject were exchanged. Sympathy and curiosity moved them to further meetings, they talked about personal and cultural issues.

Further information can be found here.

© Gustav Franz