EXHIBITION CONCEPT AND PROGRAMME
INTRO
by Ganzeer
POSTER
by Ganzeer
GALLERY EXHIBITION
Installation views:
Photos by Annika Rauhala
THE CREW
From left: Marita Muukkonen (co-curator), Hany Rashed (artist), Stephanie Roiko (assistant), Ammar Abo Bakr (artist), Khaled Jarrar (artist), audience member, Ahmed Hefnawy (artist), Ivor Stodolsky (co-curator).
Artists not in the picture: Hamdy Reda, Ganzeer and Jasmina Metwaly.
HUNGER WALL, an intervention
Hunger Wall Invitation
Curated by Ivor Stodolsky and Marita Muukkonen
Commissioned by Checkpoint Helsinki as part of Helsinki Festival
The 7th iteration of the Re-Aligned Project of Perpetuum Mobilε
Lasipalatsi Square, Helsinki 22-31 August, 2014
Read the FULL PROGRAMME
On the heels of the positive public resonance to BACK TO (THE) SQUARE 1 of March 2014, Checkpoint Helsinki presents a second iteration of the Re-Aligned Project. Taking over the central Lasipalatsi Square, TO THE SQUARE 2 will connect to artistic and political movements on several continents.
TSQ2 ARTISTS: Ammar Abo Bakr (Luxor/Cairo); Núria Güell (Barcelona), Khaled Jarrar (Ramallah); Vladan Jeremić & Rena Rädle (Belgrade); Nikolay Oleynikov (Nizhny Novgorod/Moscow); Raumlabor (Berlin); ZIP Group (Krasnodar).
Featuring THE SQUARE newspaper edited by Ivor Stodolsky; design by Tzortzis Rallis (Occupied Times); art by Ganzeer, Federico Geller, Vladan Jeremić & Rena Rädle and articles by Michel Bauwens, Feminist Pencil, Grey Violet, Núria Güell, G.U.L.F., Occupy Museums, Teivo Teivainen, Telekommunisten and Nadya Tolokonnikova of Zona Prava/Pussy Riot.
TO THE SQUARE 2
From Tunis to Tahrir Square, Cairo
From Occupy to Wikileaks and Blockupy ECB, Frankfurt
From Tiananmen Square in Beijing to Bolotnaya Square in Moscow …
What fills a square? A tent, a tank or a tower? A mob, a demand or a feast of engaged arts? Where are all those people who took to the square? At home? In court? In prison? In exile? Where did it all come from, and where does it go — that revolutionary energy?
What would it take for people to go TO THE SQUARE 2… to revolt again? Something revolting? Total economic inequality? Ecological catastrophe? Raw racism? An infinitely bigger “big brother”? Everybody knows: it’s all happening already…
Everybody knows. Yet who, just strolling across the square, does anything? The increasingly cynical answer of the generation of the “post-modern”, was to turn their collective back on reality. But problems only grew. Today’s generation “pre-” has to face the real world, as it were, by force of nature.
Art climbs a tower, takes a bird’s-eye view, builds a springboard… it dreams and rebels. A drawing-board for ideas, art re-imagines societies to re-make them.
TO THE SQUARE 2 brings artists from different regions with experience of real action on the squares and streets, to a shared space. In a square in Helsinki, and through a “pre-mondial” network, they will seek to mobilize people with art.
www.checkpointhelsinki.fi / www.perptualmobile.org / www.helsinginjuhlaviikot.fi/en/
Jasmina Metwaly (EG/PL) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Cairo. She studied painting in Poznan where she focused on time-based works with strong correlations to painting. She is co-founder
of 8784 h project. Following the revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, Metwaly was a founding member of the video and social-media collective Mosireen and collaborated with the filmmaker Philip Rizk, promoting video activism and “document unrest”. More recently, she has spent time in the studio and in residency in Italy, reflecting on the tumultuous past with a renewed focus on artistic practice and its specific audience. She is interested in the points of intersection/division between single-channel image, video and documentary filmmaking. Metwaly’s work has been exhibited locally and at international art venues and festivals including Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; 7th Berlin Biennale, Berlin; Forum Expanded Berlinale Film Festival 2014, Berlin; International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012, Rotterdam; Kings Gate, London; Virtual Museum, CASZuidas, Amsterdam, BWA, Wroclaw; amongst others.
With the ongoing changes taking place in Egypt, Hany Rashed constantly explores artful possibilities and attempts to produce innovative, fresh works. Hany Rashed was out in the streets for best part of the last three years. His ceaseless creative activity has responded to the unfolding socio-political events and changes in the country. Returning to the studio, his works still carry the energy of the street – if tinted by the sense of humour of a one-time student of the prominent painter Mohamed Abla. A highly versatile artist, Hany Rashed has painted and sculpted Egyptians and Europeans, cars and children, models and policemen, tackling popular and pop culture. Working in genres from abstraction to monoprints, the constant element of his work is the lovable, if fickle human being. Rashed has exhibited his work in major venues internationally, including in Dubai, London and Berlin.
Mosireen is a non-profit media collective in Downtown Cairo born out of the explosion of citizen media and cultural activism in Egypt during the revolution. The collective consists of filmmakers, activists and others who got together to found a communal space dedicated to supporting citizen media that itself supports social justice. Mosireen is involved in filming and documenting the ongoing revolution in Egypt, publishing videos that challenge state media narratives, providing training, technical support and equipment. It hosts an extensive library of footage from the revolution, and organise screenings and events, such as the renowned Tahrir Cinema, the open-air screening of the revolution’s own terrifying and exhilarating experiences, on Tahrir Square itself.
Photo by: Abdel Rahman Zein el Din
Ahmed Hefnawy came to contemporary art late, as the art director and senior illustrator for a advertising company. With experience ranging from Arabic calligraphy, to oil and pastel painting, Hefnawy’s first major contribution was as an installation, in December 2013, to an exhibition at the abandoned “Hotel Vienoise” in Cairo. Joining Ganzeer, Hany Rashed and Ammar Abu Bakr for “K/harya”, this self-organised group show played on the close proximity of the words “freedom” and “shit” in Arabic.
Works:
Paintings on wood for BACK TO (THE) SQUARE 1
Mural for TO THE SQUARE 2
Ammar Abo Bakr studied at Faculty of Fine Arts, Painting Department, at Luxor University, where he now teaches. His passion to educate and communicate through art has taken his work from the studio to the public space; his graffiti and murals are as much about his own artistic expression as they are generating and contributing to a larger dialogue with the public.
Abo Bakr’s revolutionary street art has cased walls in Cairo, Luxor, Frankfurt, Berlin, Amsterdam and Brussels, journaling the Egyptian Revolution’s many turning points. He became most famous for his mural on Mohamed Mahmoud Street leading to Cairo’s Tahrir Square that honors those who have lost their lives in ongoing clashes with the security state.
Abo Bakr will paint new murals to the To The Square 2 -exhibition.
ON THE MOVE / SAFE HAVEN ARTIST
Contributor to RE-PUBLIC
Contributor to BACK TO SQUARE 1
Photograph by Dörthe Boxberg
Ganzeer is the nom de plume of the graphic designer and artist from Cairo whose street images have come to epitomize the Egyptian Revolution for a global audience (take his stencil of a life-size tank near Tahrir Square, which continues to evoke local and global responses).
Crossing freely between art, graphic design and political “artivism”, Ganzeer’s work has been in exhibitions from Egypt, Germany, Finland, Holland, Poland, Italy, the Arab Emirates and Jordan to Brazil and the USA. The London Guardian has described Ganzeer as a major player in an emerging “counter-culture art scene on the mainstream radar”, and Al-Monitor.com has placed him on a list of 50 people shaping the culture of the Middle East today. While Art In America has associated Ganzeer with a “New Realism”, we consider the term “Re-Aligned Art” a fresher term for artistic practices as his, which responds with great artistic skill and political wit to the host of challenges faced by a new generation.
Hamdy Reda is a visual artist, photographer, graphic designer, curator. He is the founding-director of Artellewa Art Space in Ard Ellewa, a popular district of Cairo. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1997 and lives and works in Egypt’s capital. He frequently travels between Cairo, Bern, Oslo, Paris, Stockholm and many other cities, organizing and taking part in residences and workshops. Hamdy Reda’s work has been shown in over 9 solo exhibitions and more than 25 group shows.
Works:
For BACK TO (THE) SQUARE 1: Hunger Wall (performative action and installation of Finnish round bread and wood), Sea Level (video), Diver in Ramallah, (Photo-print on foil under plexiglass), Concrete (video), Football (sculpture). See installation views.
For TO THE SQUARE 2: Dis-/Obey
Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar works with photography, video and performance to interrogate the problematic situation in his native country, particularly the question of recognition of the State of Palestine and the militaristic discourse around this. He uses his artistic practice as a means of thinking about the questions of conflict, nationhood, home and belonging.
Jarrar is also a filmmaker, whose documentary, The Infiltrators (2012), won several accolades at the Dubai International Film Festival. The film was screened as part of Back to (The) Square 1 at the Andorra cinema on March 2014. Jarrar’s new commission was seen at To The Square 2 in Lasipalatsi Square, August 2014.
