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Creative Impact Lab Cairo

Photo by Jorge Láscar is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Creative Impact Lab Cairo is a five-week online creative exchange that utilizes community-driven digital and new media art projects to address women’s empowerment.

Lead Artist

Headshot of Katherine Behar holding two black sculptures made of keyboards.

Katherine Behar

Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist whose works exploring gender and labor in contemporary digital culture have appeared throughout North America and Europe. Pera Museum presented Katherine Behar: Data's Entry | Veri Girişi (2016), a comprehensive survey exhibition and catalog. Additional solo exhibitions include Backups (2019), Anonymous Autonomous (2018), E-Waste (2014, catalog/traveling), and numerous others collaborating as "Disorientalism." Behar is the editor of Object-Oriented Feminism, coeditor of And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, and author of Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity. She is Associate Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Artist Talk with Katherine

Katherine kicked off Creative Impact Lab Cairo with an artist talk titled "Backups & Backchannels: From Saving to Secrets in Art, Technology, and Women's Empowerment" which introduced participants and the public to her creative practice and approach to the Lab.

Participant Projects

Collage of nine images with screenshots from 8 works-in-progress plus the Recto & Verso exhibition logo in the center.
 
Recto & Verso showcases eight diverse, new media art works-in-progress by Creative Impact Lab Cairo participants that collectively express the multifaceted complexities of women’s empowerment in Egypt. “Recto and verso” is a Latin phrase used by book designers to indicate the front and back sides of a page. In the “old media” pages of a book, the physical form of the paper page ensures that there is always another side. So too, in the digital artworks in this exhibition, new media forms ensure the structural impossibility of reductivist thinking—such as the notion of a single universal value system that would yield an easy resolution to these complex cultural issues. Instead, these works dwell in the complexities, demonstrating that there is always another side to the story.
 
Recto & Verso is curated by Katherine Behar and features works-in-progress by Rawan Abbas, Youssef Abdelmaged, Doha Aboelezz, Amany Adel, Habiba Afifi, Basma Ahmed, Ahmad Aiuby, Ramah Aleryan, Sara El-Barkouky, Esraa Elfeky, Fatma El Zahraa, Ahmed Fouadeldin, Fatma Heiba, Mariam Ibrahim, Dina Jereidini, Yara Mekawei, Agnes Michalczyk, and Zeina Raafat.
SEE PARTICIPANT PROJECTS

Host Partner

Medrar for Contemporary Art

Medrar for Contemporary Art is a non-profit art space based in Cairo, Egypt setting the stage for artists seeking to have extensive conversations and collaborations with their peers to embrace their purpose as active contemporary artists and create a more dynamic and inspired movement. By tapping into this existing collective intelligence, Medrar, which started as a collective in 2005, encourages cooperation over competition among artists, locally and internationally, and plays a fundamental role as an artistic hub and cultural incubator for emerging and established artists.  Alongside a diversity of exhibitions, workshops, and artist talks taking place every year, Medrar is concerned with hosting and constantly developing five key projects: Cairo Video Festival, Roznama Visual Arts Competition and Exhibition, Roznama Studio Program, Medrar TV, and Medrar’s Media Lab.

Outreach Partners

Out of the Circle LogoD2D Art LogoCairotronica Logo

Sponsor

U.S. Flag

U.S. Embassy Cairo

The mission of the United States Embassy is to advance the interests of the United States, and to serve and protect U.S. citizens in Egypt.

Creative Impact Lab Cairo (2021) is a ZERO1 international exchange supported by U.S. Embassy Cairo and hosted by Medrar. Outreach support is provided by Out of the CircleD2D Art, and Cairotronica.

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