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A State of Fluidity - curated films by Maha Maamoun and Sara Rifky

Curator’s Statement

Sometimes I imagine us together, I think of ‘us’ as a situation; but this – this is a fluid state, it is a condition, which we are all a part of. Half the time we imagine situations and create them, constructing them, in our minds, then we step back and observe in wonderment this fluid state that is all embracing, and impossible to exit or escape. We follow inspiration towards intimacy, the comfort of lingering in a space of one’s own thought, fleeting, or a rumination, that stays. I sit on the edge of a cliff and look down. The cliff, a limit to my own humanity, my own intelligence. I look down, and the view opens up beneath us, an open sea, a horizon. Jumping seems like a bad idea, but it’s nice to take in the view that cannot be contained within the mind except from that vantage point perhaps.

Perhaps, you can close your eyes, and imagine it differently. You may be asleep, but your mind is still lucid like it never has been before. You wake up to the underworld of your thoughts, an after-hours club, a Russian billiard parlour overflowing with men in the heart of Damascus. You walk in and it opens up in stretches of red sand, laden with iron, it is red. You walk and shallow waters reflect pink flamingos, all balancing with ease on one leg. There are two boat wrecks. The sand is like clay, but it is iron, it sticks to your feet, weighing you down, grounding, it slows down your steps. The sky opens up low and wide. The trees, in the distance, are low too. Everything appears to be horizontal. A race of situations keeps taking you back to the top of the cliff, where you see yourself looking down, at yourself, leaving a trail of footprints in red clay sands, next to nothing. You stand there, with me, words appear like birds, and ideas are all cut out from books, other works, pieces of fabric, flags, pairs of scissors, typewriters, discarded computers, drawing boards, and tables upside down, stacks of newspapers, and books banned once upon a time, an old crochet tunic, an unlikely pile of things in red, black, white and green, strings of pearls, yourself in a mirror, and glasses, for short sightedness, are lined up ahead of you on the utmost edge of the cliff. The glasses look and you look after them. You look out, the horizon is a limit of a view. More ...

Biography

Maha Maamoun lives and works in Cairo, Egypt. As an artist she primarily works with photography and video. Most recently she co-edited, with Haytham el-Wardany, a book titled The Middle Ear, for Sharjah Biennial 10. Her recent exhibitions include: ‘Second World’, Steirischer Herbst (2011), Outres Mesures, La Galerie – Contemporary Art Centre in Noisy-le-Sec (2011), ‘The End of Money’, Witte de With – Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2011), ‘Mapping Subjectivity’, MoMA, New York (2010), and ‘Live Cinema’, Philadelphia Museum of Art (2010). She was co-curator of ‘PhotoCairo3’ (2005) and assistant curator for ‘Meeting Points 5’ (2007). Maamoun is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC).

Sarah Rifky lives and works in Cairo and elsewhere. She has been curator of the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art since 2009 and has taught at the American University in Cairo and MASS Alexandria in 2010. She studied visual art and mass communication at the American University in Cairo and received her MFA in Critical Studies from the Malmö Art Academy, Lund University in Sweden. She co-edited the artist book Damascus: Tourists, Artists Secret Agents’. Her projects include ‘Invisible Publics’ (Cairo, 2010), ‘The Popular Show’ (Cairo, 2011), an accord is first and foremost a proposition (New York, 2011) and ‘The Bergen Accords’ (Bergen, 2011). She is a curatorial agent for documenta (13) and founding director of CIRCA, the Cairo International Resource Center for Art.