An exhibition at the Saad Zaghloul Cultural Centre called Future of the City was a remarkable way to conclude 2010, bringing together some extra-special visions of the artists' home towns. Rania Khallaf reports The idea was unique. How do we visualise our own cities, wherever they are, and how do we envision ourselves in the streets of these cities in the future? "The idea was left hanging in the air for two years after it was first discussed in a workshop in the Townhouse Gallery," said Paul Geday, an artist and photographer and the exhibition's curator. A group of artists took the idea and developed it into an exhibition entitled The Chart, after which Geday thought of holding this exhibition and started looking for participants. Thirteen artists from around the world showed their work in the two-week show, which closed at the end of December. Geday believes that there are several artists in Egypt who have dealt one way or another with the concept of the city. So what made this show unique was that it aimed to explore "the future city", as Geday called it. "The concept of the exhibition leads us to think how the future city will be like in a decade or a century from now." Not unexpectedly, some of the works in the exhibition were merely a nostalgic reminder of cities in the past, while others just explored a picture of a city in the coming years or decades. Xenia Nikolskaya from Russia opted for a visual art work that featured the city of Leningrad in the year 2069. She described it as "a city that will never exist" by featuring a short documentary film from 1969 of Leningrad, a city that has ceased to exist. "When my uncle, a sailor and amateur filmmaker, took this 8-mm. film, he could not imagine that the name of his home town would be erased from the map," she said. The work showed her uncle's neutral vision of the city, as it was taken from a deck of a ship; a vision of a country with an unpredictable future, as Nikolskaya put it. "I believe the future city of Cairo is being formulated now, but no one is aware of it because the dissemination of information is not available, and for other reasons," Geday told Al-Ahram Weekly. "So for me it is the future which matters here. We artists are not illustrating real cities in particular," he explained. "The city visualised in the exhibition is the one located in the minds of artists; their own individual vision of the future city. Most of the works have been done for this specific exhibition, and this is quite an achievement." There were some stunning works by Swiss artists that reflected their own imaginary pictures of their future cities. From Egypt, one of the most amazing works was "Black City", an enormous painting by Nirmeen El-Ansari. In her Black City, Ansari focused on the place of the individual in a mega-city that is constantly being reshaped. "How can anyone practise a normal life when mobility becomes a concerning factor?" she asked. "With the lack of spacious areas and unbinding spaces, the individual's energy is repressed and confined in established structures." The Black City conveyed Ansari's own image of an angry city where solid and fleeting characters were intermingled, while sweeping constructions impeded individual mobility and their communications with one another. Ansari's works range from painting to animation, from notebooks to printing, from photography to digital live drawing performances. Geday contributed with a quite unique work, "The Virtual City", which was actually a gallery he made up on the Web. "Our life on the net is not real; it is virtual. So I gathered different pictures and made up a gallery on Facebook, and exhibited it in the real exhibition," he said. "The exhibition space does not have to be physical. This specific piece is intended as a web-based work for the web audience." Within the framework of the event, and in a rather new tradition, Egyptian filmmaker Mohamed Khan gave a lecture entitled "The City, its inhabitants and cinematic practice" at the Saad Zaghloul Cultural Centre in Downtown Cairo, where the exhibition took place. Khan discussed the reason behind his fascination with the city's residents, and how his cinematic vision of the city yearned towards documenting its history. Khan, one of the most distinctive filmmakers in Egyptian cinema today, and who has a career spanning 30 years, discussed with the audience his very real passion for Downtown Cairo. The discussion was led by his son Hassan Khan, an established artist, musician and writer. The cultural scene, I believe, is in dire need of such futuristic exhibitions and studies so as to encourage us stop living in the past and move away from the shadow of our great but ancient ancestors.
