Cairo's Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) will open, before the festival officially kicks off, a visual arts exhibition entitled "The Great Tricks From Your Future."
The exhibition, which opens 16 March, will continue until 11 April, while on 21 March, a multi-disciplinary show — an evening of mainly live performances and a video screening — will create a sense of the differing and yet complementary narratives that constitute history, and are also a force propelling us into the future.
The ongoing visual arts segment will incorporate artists showcasing their works across several rooms of the Old French Consulate.
Basel Abbas (Palestine) and Ruanne Abou Rahme (USA/Palestine) will present a mixed media installation in one room and two films by projection in another room.
For his part, Egyptian artist Basim Magdy will occupy three rooms for screenings of films, slide shows, and an installation of light boxes.
The exhibition is an ongoing project in which the artists weave together seemingly unrelated events, both fact and fiction, as part their own investigation of how the radical potential of the present moment might be experienced or understood.
"The Great Tricks From Your Future" is part of a broader programme that according to the curator, Mai Abu El-Dahab, is supplemented by the live performances evening.
The elements are "brought together by a common thread; that they each develop very specific tools for inventing narratives, mixing reality and science fiction, bringing the past into the present, inventing an audio rather than spoken language, etc," Abu El-Dahab explains.
Located on Fadl Street in Cairo's downtown, the Old French Consulate is among the new venues that will host the 4th edition of the D-CAF, with the core programme expanding between 19 March and 9 April.
The festival will include a total of six segments — performing arts, urban visions, music, visual arts, film, and special events — each filled with a variety of artistic elements.
Source: Ahram Online