City Volume Cairo | Exhibition
April 8, 2021
Exhibition Opening
From 5:00 pm to 9:00 pm
April 8, 2021 till April 19, 2021
Exhibition Dates
From 10:00 am to 9:00 pm
Location
Margo Veillon Gallery, Tahrir Cultural Center
April 10, 2021
Performances
From 1:00 pm to 10:00 pm
Location
AUC Tahrir Cultural Center, the Fountain area.
We are excited to present City Volume Cairo – an exhibition of SOUND ART by artists from four continents at TCC this April. The exhibition is the result of a meeting between three artists in Cairo and three institutions from Switzerland and Egypt: Duncan MacDonald (Director of Visual Arts at AUC), Isis Fahmy (Researcher at La Manufacture – Lausanne) and Benoît Renaudin (Researcher at HEAD – Geneva).
Cairo is one of the loudest and most fascinating cityscapes one can find. Amplified calls to prayer, millions of vehicle honks, street vendors announcing their business with coded sound effects, the vocal bustle of the city – to puncture this cacophony one has to compete with a wide range of frequencies and decibel levels. What can we learn about this city by listening to it? What can we learn about its inhabitants? And what can we do to remix this cacophony to propose a rubric of understanding and empathy?
Translating the ideas and noise of urban sound into art is a process of experiencing the city, listening to the city, and re-mixing the city on conceptual, aesthetic, and philosophical levels. The artists involved with this project all work with sound in conjunction with the place, not space. They consider context as key to understanding meaning, and the social, as central to artistic creation. Translating invisible signals that we are constantly bombarded with into experimental sound; researching a city by wandering and recording its unique tonal timbres; translating city noise into experimental electronic works; documenting curfew quietude in our current pandemic; re-imagining city soundscapes with technological innovation; studying the communication of drivers in Cairo – these are all strategies by our group of artists to unpack the layered and dynamic impressions sound provides us within daily life and, in turn, offer re-mixed alternatives.
Artists include: Benoit Renaudin, Isis Fahmy, Ola Saad, Asmaa Azouz, Hagar Masoud, Thomas Perrodin, Julie Semeroz, Budhatiya C., and others…
Covid protocols are to be followed with only 10 visitors in the gallery at any given time.
Registration is to be done through AUC Connect: HERE
