Conversations

Conversations is a space for discussions and dialogue with invited guest writers, artists, critics, and curators on relevant topics, current events and exhibitions, modes of working, forms of funding, etc. It is divided into three sections;

︎︎︎ Texts in the form of reviews and articles.
︎︎︎ Podcast episodes with invited guests.
︎︎︎ K-oh-llective blog entries.   

Whose Humanities? Western Academia’s Persisting Complicity

Sanabel Abdelrahman
Translation: Ebrahim Bahaa El-din


Western academia tends to extract martyrdom from all contexts but real life. Whether in the United States of America, Europe, or other contexts in which white hegemony and supremacy could potentially be upheld, Western academia lingers on the potentialities of death, love, poetry, pluralism, sacrifice, nobility, discipline, liberation, and commitment without investigating Israel’s settler-colonial prerequisites to Palestinian martyrdom and its tragic materialization. Thus, the Palestinian martyr is transformed into an abstract entity that provokes Western academia’s curiosity and fetishism regarding this blurred time-space in which a human being willingly accepts death - the annihilation of their very being- as a price for a dignified life for future Palestinians. The Palestinian martyr becomes an impossible thing, an unfathomable feat, while being pigeonholed in non-real, non-believable, non-understandable spheres of being and of dying. The Palestinian martyr in Western academia is seldom perceived in the flesh and blood to begin with, and their death, therefore, is not a human death. For this imaginary, all Palestinian martyrdom is the stuff of fiction at best; at worst, an act of awesome terror.

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Art critics in Cairo: An alternative plot

Mai Elwakil


Art writers are expected to accumulate knowledge and practical experience, to build networks with artists, spaces and platforms, to present their work. We are expected to prove ourselves worthy of documenting, and analyzing artworks and practices with nuance; to conduct research and initiate or engage in discussions that stir the waters; to question the positioning of artistic practices in local, regional and international scenes when relevant, and to lay the groundwork for a possible future historiography. It is difficult to truly claim these roles without acknowledging the fragility of writers’ positions and the various jobs they perform to continue working in the field, while enjoying a level of independence and credibility. I, hence, chose, in this supposed new diagram, to focus on the less talked about economics and labor of art writing in relation to a writer’s social network.

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Thinking in Conversation: Writing on Contemporary Art

Ismail Fayed


There is definitely an intersection between writing about the arts and curating, although the two might not always align. Writing about art might need a certain distance and introspection, not necessarily available or desirable for a curator who is most often working within a specific timeframe. But also there is the problem within most contemporary curatorial practices where art speak obfuscates meaning and drowns the significance of the work in obtuse prose. It's a running joke among most audiences how difficult curatorial writing has become over the last few decades, alienating the audience and undermining the reception of the work. I think a curator must have a vision of how the artworks are going to be received and what their possible meaning might be, and at the same time be able to communicate that with the widest audience possible.

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We Need Mentors

Amira Hanafi


In June 2013, I launched a page on Facebook to share opportunities for artists in Egypt. I had recently taught a workshop for building an artistic career: writing an artist statement, putting together a project proposal, and compiling a budget. People taking part in the workshops had a common question: Where can I find opportunities for which I’m eligible to apply? I put together a document with some links to sites and sent it around, and it was the beginning of what would later grow into an online platform with more than ten thousand followers, mostly local.

When the members of K-oh-llective asked me to write this piece and approached me as the founder of “Opportunities for Egypt Artists”, they wondered, “What would drive an artist to set up a platform for sharing information?” There’s no straightforward response; the answer is probably as knotty as my creative practice, as contradictory as my personality, as skewed as my life path.

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On Artists and Institutional Stigma

Mays Albaik


I began writing this essay to answer a question: what do institutions want from artists? But I want to use this opportunity to think beyond this antagonistic dichotomy. Art institutions are made up of individuals who want to make art happen. The question should be, what do artists, collectively, want from a collectively organized group of creative practitioners?

This might seem like an abstract train of thought to follow in comparison to the question I received, but it doesn’t need to be. To think of institutions as a group of people would affect how an artist can approach any relationship with institutions. Applying for a grant? Think of the selection jury reading your application as a group of people, not as a faceless and nameless mass of regulations and bureaucracy. An application is an argument to convince a group of people that they want to work with you on achieving what you want to achieve.

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