The American University in Cairo's Sharjah Art Gallery at the New Cairo Campus presents “In Conversation”, a group show including works by Noor Abuarafeh, Nada Elkalaawy, Rania Fouad, Mona Marzouk, Lina Osama, Hend Samir, and Aya Tarek. This exhibition is the result of months of research and exchange by the artists, observing ways of using and challenging painting as a medium and a fine art tradition in Egypt today. Conversations are essential to the work. One of the motivations for the conversations behind this exhibition was to place Egyptian reality in confrontation with the global obsession with the end of painting. Introduced to Egypt in the 19th century, painting is alive and well, possibly because it evolved concomitantly with photography as non-rival correlative practices. In our age of advanced technologies, this exhibition introduces artists whose work shows the ability of painting to reinvent itself as a confluence of photography, cinema, Internet imagery, manual, industrial and digital processes, implying deep transformations in the ways a picture is conceived, sketched, and realised. They share a self-reflective and introspective relation to images stemming from the combined force of new media, postmodern thought and painting history. 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The exhibition will remain on view until 20 April.
