Bubblegum Club

Tag: Egypt

  • Kamila Bassioni – The Illustrator and collage artist conveying feelings of suffering with her cardboard characters

    Kamila Bassioni – The Illustrator and collage artist conveying feelings of suffering with her cardboard characters

    Earthy colours. Muted tones. Abstract, stylistic characters cut, collaged and pasted together to form a whole. All to deliver emotion and critical thought.

    Cairo-based visual artist, Kamila Bassioni completed her B.A. in scenography at the Fine Arts College in Egypt. Her work’s focus for the last few years has been freelance illustration, such as the design of book covers and illustrating children’s picture books. Outside of her commissioned work Kamila works on personal projects and has taken part in multiple group shows.

    Kamila’s inspiration for personal work is often found in her commissioned projects, as well as from human emotion, thoughts and actions of suffering. With her art, she attempts to convey and share different ways of thinking, particularly with regards to concept. Her aim is to open up the eyes of her spectators and to facilitate a more critical view within her audience.

    Working predominantly in paper and cardboard, Kamila merges cut-out and collaging techniques to create her characters that vary in size from minute to enormous. Each character evokes its own feeling and mood.

    An example of this can be found in the project, Rags to Riches, an installation of large-scale standing dolls representing the hopelessness and pain of the 1930’s Great Depression and simultaneously paints the current state that Egyptian citizens find themselves in.

    Kamila’s work has a tendency to convey feelings of anguish and pain. Her work ranging on melancholy attempts to instil a critical stance from her viewer and touches on politically loaded subjects, reflecting on out past and present world.

  • South Africa, What’s Up? Residency at ANTiGEL Festival

    Over the last 8 years ANTiGEL Festival has grown to become one of the largest cultural events in Geneva. By bringing artistic experience to parts of the city that are detached from this kind of engagement, the festival aims to be a reminder of the importance of making spaces for arts and culture. Africa What’s Up is a residency that falls within the festival. Artists from South Africa and Egypt have been invited to put together an evening dedicated to cultural music and cultural production on their countries.

    Photography by Chris Saunders

    Throughout the week-long residency, South African and Egyptian artist have been interacting with cultural producers from Mali, Nigeria and Switzerland. It has also provided a moment of pause and refection. In addition to the time spent networking and teasing out performance plans, artists have been able to engage with one another and the residency organisers in daily roundtable discussions. This expands the purpose of the residency to that of a space for conversations that directly affect artists. These include conversations around womxn’s access to performance time and how this is connected to networks, resources and development. Discussions also included the larger question of access for artists in general with regards to visa applications and funding to sustain their practices.

    Photography by Viviane Sassen

    Even though the residency has a focus on music, it also embraces the importance of cross-disciplinary pollination. This can be seen by the performance element.

    South Africa’s CUSS Group and the Swiss cultural organisation Shap Shap co-curated the South Africa What’s Up lineup, which includes performances by FAKA, DJ Prie Nkosazana, Dirty Paraffin and DJ Lag. Choreographer Manthe Ribane and Swiss electro-soul duo Kami Awori will be presenting their collaborative effort. Having met in Johannesburg, they have combined music, choreography and a visual display to present a full sensory experience.

    Photography by Kent Andreasen

    What is particularly important about the residency is how it encourages cross-disciplinary pollination and has opened up discussion around what it necessary to facilitate easier access to gigs and spaces for African artists. It has also provided a space to draw out how these kinds of conversations need to be translated into pragmatic steps for action.

    Photography by Chris Saunders

  • Street art in Egypt with Aya Tarek

    “I used to say I’m not political, but I realised that everything you do is political. Walking down the street is political,” she says. “So, it is political, but it doesn’t have to be propaganda.”

    Although much attention was given to Egyptian street art after the revolution in 2011, the trigger for the Arab Spring, street artist Aya Tarek has been making work since 2008 when she was just 18 years old. She found her fine art classes at the Alexandria University too restricting, and so she cleaned up her grandfather’s studio and invited her friends over to experiment with non-traditional art forms. The walls all over Alexandria soon became her canvas.

    “I think Downtown Alexandria inspired everything I do. The architecture from back then was really great. I used to hang out and see these amazing buildings in Art Deco. Even during the 90s, the city was stuck in the 60s, so the comics I used to buy were from the 60s. Everything was time capsuled in this era and we didn’t have anything else. So it was like I was in a different era, in this era,” Tarek explains in an interview with Cairo Scene.

    Challenging the institutionalized approach to art creation and art display, her work has seen her travel to Beirut, Berlin, Cologne and Frankfurt. Her work has seen her recognized as one of the first serious street artists from Alexandria. This caught the attention of independent filmmaker Ahmed Abdallah, and led to Tarek being featured in the film Microphone, which explores Alexandria’s art scene.

    Tarek participated in a successful exhibition titled White Wall Beirut where she and a number of other street artists from around the world were invited to create work in the Beirut Art Centre, as well as around the city. Receiving a positive response to her work, Tarek commented that she prefers making work on the streets and not within exclusive art walls. By creating work on the streets people who are intimidated by galleries and museums are able to engage with her work.

    Her contribution to the White Wall exhibition

    While Tarek appreciates the attention given to artists after the revolution in 2011, she tries to shy away from making her work directly political. She explains that she would like her work to seen for its artistic value and not simply because she is an Arab woman creating work within a highly contested political environment. Despite this desire she acknowledges the fact that existing and creating cannot be divorced from politics.

    Check out more of her work on Facebook.