The death this week of Chant Avedissian robs Egypt of one of its best known artists. Though his international reputation had grown steadily over the last two decades in his homeland, his best known work remains a handful of images from the extensive (...)
With Seif and Adham Wanly the difference, like the devil, is in the detail, writes Nigel Ryan
Walking into Horizon One and wandering around its current show of works by the Wanly brothers it is difficult to resist speculating on just how the two (...)
Nigel Ryan finds solace at the Mashrabiya
There is a piece of tapestry in one of Romano della Chiesa's paintings, currently on show at the Mashrabiya Gallery alongside a video installation and some textile pieces by Ayman El-Semary. It is a crude (...)
Tariq Ali spoke twice last week at AUC. Nigel Ryan attended the first of his lectures
Literature and market realism, the title of the first public lecture Tariq Ali gave at the Oriental Hall at AUC -- he is currently visiting Cairo as part of AUC's (...)
Stick in your thumb and pull out... well at the Centre of Arts its a matter of luck, writes Nigel Ryan
The Bird, A Formative Element in the Exhibition by Artist Hamdi Abul-Maati: well, if you think the title is a bit of a mouthfull go and see the (...)
Not much cheer in youth when even the alienation strikes false, writes Nigel Ryan
The Annual Youth Salon -- it is an event of sorts, though it can be dispiriting and more than a little desultory. Perhaps it is the earnestness of it all, the absolute (...)
By Nigel Ryan
The decrepit, the seemingly tumble-down, the almost but not quite falling apart at the seams, these are relatively common sights in Cairo. But the ruinous, the totally uninhabited because sufficiently unstable to deter even the most (...)
Film producer Ismail Merchant, head of this year's festival jury, charms Nigel Ryan and Youssef Rakha
Charming. It is a much abused adjective, rendered derelict through overuse. Yet there is really no other word, no more apposite phrase, to describe (...)
By Nigel Ryan
There are few things, in my experience, more nerve wracking than an investment analyst in a funk. It's not the sudden rush that you might get from, say, waving a red rag in front of a bull. The pawing at the ground, the lowering of the (...)
If we were all heading in exactly the same direction the world would be a far less interesting place. So Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni tells Nigel Ryan and Amina Elbendary
The most striking thing about the villa that houses the offices of (...)
Obituary:
Leon Boyadjian (Van Leo)
By Nigel Ryan
Cairo 1939-45, and on to 1952, and even a little beyond: it is well-ploughed territory. The divisions, regardless of the magnitude of unfolding events, can come to seem surprisingly arbitrary, (...)
A refugee of the highest order: David Blake, Al-Ahram Weekly's music critic, died last week. He is remembered by his colleagues
David Blake was one of the last, and certainly the most public, of Frank Brown's creations. It was the name under which (...)
The work of Mahmoud Mukhtar is too often rendered invisible by its symbolic burdens, writes Nigel Ryan
There had been no sculptor in my country for seventeen hundred years and the images that appeared among the ruins and sands at the edge of the (...)
David Hockney, at the Palace of Arts, offers more than might be expected, writes Nigel Ryan
Three snakes stretch horizontally across a white background, three bands of colour, the top blue, the middle pink and red, the bottom ochre. Only one of (...)
And then maybe assemble it into a collage. Nigel Ryan on the promise of a new gallery season
It has been a long summer. Is it too kind to describe it as sultry? Certainly, humidity appeared to hit new highs. Or is it simply that the memory fails (...)
Nigel Ryan speaks to Walid Aouni about June's festival of dance theatre
The artistic director of the Festival of Dance Theatre, now in its third year, is more than a little equivocal about that much abused word appearing in the title of the event. (...)
Prizes, both real and booby. The International Cairo Biennale offers much of both, even in a single venue, writes Nigel Ryan
The Eighth International Cairo Biennale continues until the middle of next month and occupies a majority of the Ministry of (...)
Yesterday President Mubarak inaugurated the 33rd Cairo International Book Fair, following which he met with intellectuals. Today and tomorrow crowds comprising readers (whether actual or "potential"), weekenders and a broad base of intellectual (...)
By Nigel Ryan
Both the Centre of Art, Zamalek, and Horizon One Gallery, attached to the Mahmoud Khalil Museum, are hosting an impressive selection of instantly recognisable names. It is the kind of brand recognition of which advertisers must dream (...)
By Nigel Ryan
It is all too easy to think of the portrait as a proto-modern genre; the degree of realism necessary to escape the iconic imperative or hieratic stricture is seen, erroneously, as a post-Renaissance prerogative, dependent upon a (...)