Mapping Possibilities: Coming of Age Contemporary Art in Egypt

Downtown Cairo’s Zawya Cinema recently hosted the sixth edition of Mapping Possibilities, a platform which offers audio and visual artists the opportunity to experiment and use unconventional methods to showcase their work.

Mapping Possibilities is unique in that it allows artists beyond the mainstream – the outcasts, who may not find venues to support them – a chance to exhibit their unconventional music and visuals.

Visual artists Mostafa El Baroody and Niculin Barandun, as well as audio artists AN MOKU and Ismael, showcased their rather intriguingly pulsating and enigmatic work during the event.

“In this collective, visual artists focus on generative and interactive real-time visual experimentation, while sound artists take a more sound-oriented approach, featuring non-dance electronic music,” said Mapping Possibilities creator Rami Abadir.

Self-taught in experimental visual and audio production, Abadir believes that the lack of audio-visual shows in Egypt stimulates his veneration for the art.

“For so long, visuals have been considered supplementary to the sounds, something merely in the background, but that’s not what I, and alike artists, contemplate,” said Abadir.   

But he is careful to point out that the Egyptian scene stresses originality, or as he put it “doing our own thing, our own formula”.

“We focus on experimental, intelligent dance music (idm), glitch, ambient, noise, and drone types of music,” added Abadir.

With art, essentially, one often finds unfamiliar surroundings. To some, Mapping Possibilities was just that. To others, they were right at home.

Film Student Ibrahim Ramy is of the latter ilk.

“One cannot just go to an event named Mapping Possibilities with a certain idea of what to expect, or how one should feel. What is rational to do is for one to just go free of expectations and experience everything first-hand.”

Ramy added that this kind of art is not essentially for everyone.

“Even if at any point the music made me feel uneasy, that, too, is a feeling. A sensation that the visuals and audio succeeded at making me feel,” Ramy said.

“I honestly think that whatever feelings the project offers [the viewer] – these have to be embraced. That is the beauty of it,” he added.

But 23-year-old Nada Salama stresses that an elementary understanding of contemporary art is vital prior to going to similar events because art is continuously evolving.

“You have a segment of audiences going to the Opera to listen to Omar Khairat, right? Ask said segment to go to a Mapping Possibilities event. Most will probably think the craft sucks, and it would possibly be due to their lack of understanding,” Salama told The Caravan.

Enter Petroleum Engineering Student Abdelhamid Sharaf who admitted to being padlocked in a state of perplexity.

“I just didn’t get it. I thought I was in for something a lot more interesting. From the moment I stepped in, I felt out of place,” he said.

“Of course there are people that are interested in this kind of thing, but what happened in there just wasn’t my thing.”

Journalism and Mass Communication Student Mai Essam also appeared lost when she was approached by The Caravan, claiming all visuals on display were rather “geometrical and beyond her comprehension.”