© Mostafa Abdel Aty Photography
© Mostafa Abdel Aty Photography
“Imagined Life In A Museum Vitrine” is the fourth and final chapter of the long term project “If Not For That Wall” that has been taking place at Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo over the past two years. Until June 22th, this exposition will present the work from artists as Ala Younis, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Hossam Ali, Maha Maamoun.
The chapter traces notions of desire and defeat inherent to the histories of national liberation movements in Egypt and the region, and the recession of collective forms of organization and ideas of the common in face of accelerated processes of segregation, individualization and consumption.
Imagined Life In A Museum Vitrine also considers the entanglement of “exhibiting” and “exhibition making” in established forms of narrating ideology and the writing of history. Rather than assuming exhibition-making as a “neutral” practice, Imagined Life In A Museum Vitrine intends to ask how the ways of showing and arranging material in museums and fairs are part of a loaded history that contributes to the imagination of certain forms of citizenship. Similarly the choice of specific urban backdrops in cinema or the citation of protest phrases in advertising campaigns simultaneously tap into and participate in constructing this supposedly collective imagination of individual success, identity and progressivity.
Through this exhibition, the spectator is invited to discover the works of emerging and established artists. The duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme will present their work “The Zone”. The title of the installation links the current situation in Palestine to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Science Fiction film classic Stalker (1979), a film about an area under strict military observation called “the zone”, imaginary site of fear and desire alike. Having previously worked on the Palestinian resistance movement, this work of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme is concerned with the moment after the transformation of liberation movements into regimes of authority, security and consumption.
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