Middle Eastern Studies Program and Human Rights Project Present
The Law of Existence
Wednesday, March 8, 2023
Olin, Room 102
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
artist/curator Maha Maamoun in conversation with writer Haytham el-Wardany
How to find entry points in a brutal conversation? How to summon a community of voices to diffuse a deadlock? Maha Maamoun’s artistic practices often intertwine visual and literary images, both popular and obscure, in a process of reflection on the cultural and social fabric of present day Cairo. Her subtle intervention in image and text pick on redundancies, exhausted languages, recycled imagery - features that both reveal and calcify deep-rooted structures of meaning. In their conversation, artist Maha Maamoun and writer Haytham el-Wardany will elaborate on aspects of Maamoun’s artistic practice, bringing up common themes of conversationality, seriality, quotation and reading. Maamoun and el-Wardany are long-time collaborators. They have co-worked on different projects such as The Middle Ear (co-editors), How to Disappear (writer-publisher), and Dear Animal (writer-filmmaker).
Maha Maamoun is an Egyptian artist, curator, and publisher. She is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC), an independent non-profit space for art and culture in Cairo (2004), and co-founder of Kayfa ta, an alternative publishing platform (2012).
Haytham el-Wardany lives and works in Berlin. He writes short stories and experimental prose. His most recent publication is Jackals And The Missing Letters: On Speaking Animals At Moments Of Danger (Dar Alkarma, 2023). He is the recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism (2022-23).
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Olin, Room 102
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