This piece was written for Egypt Independent's final weekly print edition, which was banned from going to press. We offer you our 50th and final edition here.
From street art to a kitsch 1970s film, books that capture the zeitgeist to a striking (...)
Azin Feizabadi is in Cairo, hosted by the art initiative Beirut. His presence is visible as you approach Beirut's villa in the form of seven ghostly, punkish flags hanging on posts from its roof. They are white and have round holes cut out of their (...)
At a commercial gallery in Zamalek, there is currently an exhibition of work by an Egyptian painter and writer who lives in New York. It consists of about two dozen pictures ranging date-wise from the early 1950s to 2012. The artist is Ahmed Morsi, (...)
BRISTOL, UK — In a museum room with parquet and expensive flowery wallpaper — dark blue, soft, shiny — the singsong sound of a woman's voice penetrates from a distance, like a radio providing background noise in a film. It comes from a pole (...)
Among the photographs, videos and text pieces that make up the bulk of work in PhotoCairo 5 are six small pencil drawings hanging in a row. Each is a depiction of the same man's face; and looking straight on, he gazes levelly at the viewer. His (...)
ISTANBUL — Artist, musician and writer Hassan Khan's selected survey exhibition at SALT is like a mystery scattered with various cryptic clues. It feels like a frustrating but at times very intriguing epic mystery written by someone with a strong (...)
Heba Yossry seems to make her films for herself. They do not seek to impress through any slickness or bravura, but rather acquire their charm coincidentally, through the intimacy with which they're made. They are not formulaic but unfold in a kind (...)
A “museum” has been set up by an international group of four people — one of whom is Egypt Independent's Helen Stuhr-Rommereim — in two small rectangular recesses under a glass tabletop in a Garden City apartment.
“Every month, an artist is invited (...)
LUXOR - In 1910, French novelist Pierre Loti wrote of the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor: “The thing that dominates the whole town, and may be seen five or six miles away, is the Winter Palace, a hasty modern production which has grown on the border (...)
There's an expression in Egyptian dialect that comes from the word parachute, yibarshut, which means to arrive uninvited and benefit from something belonging to other people. Someone can yibarshut on your cigarettes, for example, or on your (...)
On 16 January, two days after Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali resigned, Mohamed Tawfik drew a simple cartoon. In it, a solitary, average-looking man pauses while walking through an urban scene to look up at the sky, where a large five-pointed star (...)
Before the launch of Egypt's first magazine dedicated to comic book art for grown-ups, even cartoonists who were not involved in the issue were receiving phone calls of congratulation. Such was the stir caused by the arrival of Tok Tok--and half an (...)
The One and the Multiple, an exhibition currently at Artellewa--co-curated by Pedro Soler, director of the Barcelona center Hangar, and Hamdy Reda, artist and director of Artellewa--celebrates workshops and residencies that have enabled artistic (...)
Egyptian artist and professor Shady El Noshokaty is currently establishing an educational facility for young artists in Ard el Lewa, a populous, informal neighborhood west of Mohandessin. A number of artists live in the area, including Noshokaty, (...)
Concrete information regarding a possible massive landfill of the River Nile in Cairo are few and far between. Jennifer Evans reports
The plan to expand a 3.8km section of the Nile Corniche running from Maspero to the Qasr Al- Nil bridge in an (...)
Every time you inhale these days, you are subjecting yourself to possible health risks. Jennifer Evans reports
Black exhaust spews from rows of dominoed cars and microbuses idling on the oxymoronic "race home" for iftar, as the sun sets in an almost (...)
On his way to Frankfurt, American University in Cairo Press director Mark Linz spoke to Jennifer Evans about Arabic literature in translation
Five floors above the beeping horns of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, American University in Cairo (AUC) Press (...)