New arts season in Cairo set to energize

As a long summer comes to a close and vacationers migrate back to the capital, Cairo is filling up again with cars, school buses and its usual 10-hour rush hour. But it’s not all grim: there’s a lot to look forward to culture-wise from September to November, and here we’ve compiled some highlights.

September

On the visual arts front, the scene has been picking up slowly but surely in September. Last week, Medrar for Contemporary Art launched its fifth Roznama exhibition and competition featuring works by 37 artists under 30. Installed in Medrar’s own Garden City space, Mashrabia Gallery in downtown Cairo and SOMA in Zamalek, it runs through October 5. Read Ismail Fayed’s review here and more details on the show here.

Medrar co-founder Mohamed Allam also has a solo exhibition, The Contents of the Grocery Bag, at the Contemporary Image Collective opening Wednesday September 21. This exhibition, featuring choreography, video and narratives produced collaboratively between Egypt and Japan, is his first in Egypt since the large-scale My Nineties show at Townhouse in 2013.

As for Townhouse, one of Cairo’s oldest non-profit contemporary art spaces, it’s finally back to programming after a year marred by a raid and a building collapse. Townhouse’s season launches on September 25 with They Usually Lie Around a Grotto by Irish photographer and German University in Cairo professor Bryony Dunne, the artist’s first solo exhibition, in the Factory Space.

And the exhibition When Arts Become Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists(1938-1965), organized by Sharjah Art Foundation, the Culture Ministry and the American University in Cairo, runs from September 28 to October 28 at the Palace of the Arts. Part of a current wave of interest in that period (see also: Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938-1948)at Paris's Pompidou Centre next month), it brings together over 150 works, including loans from Egyptian public and private collections.

September also sees a few festivals rocking up. After an four-day event in London, two-part multidisciplinary fest Masafat is in Cairo this week featuring “forward-thinking underground culture” and promoting exchange between Egypt and the UK. Running from September 20 to 24, it is co-organized by Cairo’sVENT — one-time downtown club, now events series — and features two music events at downtown’s Shahrazade and one at an undisclosed Maadi location. Read Habiba Effat’s preview here. More info on the program here.

After a well-received first edition in 2015, Cairo Comix Festival returns from September 30 to October 2 at the American University in Cairo’s Tahrir Campus with a competition, exhibitions, talks, new releases and a showcase of comics projects and graphic novels. More information to be published here.

Two state-run festivals are bringing us theater and spiritual music in September. The Cairo International Festival for Contemporary and Experimental Theater’s 23rd edition runs from September 21 to 30 at the Cairo Opera House and other theaters. This is its first edition since the 2011 revolution, and includes performances, workshops and seminars with participants from over 30 countries, half of whom are from the region. Its program can be found here.

Also on Wednesday, the ninth Samaa International Festival for Spiritual Music and Sufi Chanting launches its week-long events. Founded and run by Intissar Abdel Fattah, who set up the International Festival for Drumming and Traditional Arts too, it includes performances from Pakistan, Senegal, Ethiopia, Romania and more, mainly at the Cairo Citadel, plus an Arabic calligraphy show.

The Geneina Theater continues its music and performing arts programming with the Darb al-Ahmar Art School’s new circus show Zambalek on September 16, 23 and 30. The theater is also hosting Cairo-based Palestinian musician Tamer Abu Ghazaleh performing tracks from his recently released album Thulth, along with Jordanian fusion band Random House, on September 24. Lebanese pop-rock band Adonis perform on September 28. More info on Geneina’s activities here.

After VENT moved out of its downtown home on Qasr al-Nil Street last year, a club run by DJ Marc Wahba opened in its place. After spending the summer renovating, Zigzag is revamping its program to include a weekly Wednesday live music night. This week, young Egyptian singer-songwriter Dina El-Wedidi takes the stage, and on September 28 it's Sudanese musician Asia Madani.

A major boon to the culture scene this season is the launch of Cimatheque’s screening program, which has been in the works since the space’s official launch in 2015 after a years-long process of building it from scratch. Alongside more regular programing, Cimatheque kicks off with Revisiting Memory, accompanied by workshops and talks and building on an an ongoing research project. External curators have been invited to create programs, while screenings of films by the late, great Mohamed Khan will also be shown throughout September and October. See the September program here.

Cimatheque also continues its great Dinner at the Movies collaboration withEish & Malh on September 28. Read Andeel on the project here.

October

October sees Zawya’s return after a break in which its host, Cinema Odeon, takes over its screen for Eid film releases. It is anticipating two main films for the month: Oscar-winning Michael Moore’s latest documentary Where to Invade Next?, along with a debut feature by Lebanese director Mir-Jean Bou Chaaya,Very Big Shot. Zawya will also hosting a retrospective for Mohamed Khan, who passed away this summer. Cimatheque’s screenings of Khan films will also continue in October.

Mahatat for Contemporary Arts, which works on decentralizing arts and creating public space performances, also has an interesting season ahead. From September 27 to October 18, Mahatat is running Circ’Us with 15 street performers from France, Germany and Egypt specialized in circus, street theater, acrobatics and physical theater. Performances are to be developed through a residency in Port Said followed by a tour through that city, the Delta, Cairo and Alexandria. At the end of October, Mahatat is organizing what sounds like a much-needed forum entitled Cultural Entrepreneurship: Incubating Innovative Businesses in Egypt's Regions.

October marks the slow start of the Goethe Institute moving its activities from its downtown center to its new, innovatively built Dokki space, adjacent to its long-held white villa. The German cultural institute has run its arts programing, as well as housed its library and administration, in downtown since it set up its regional office in Cairo in 1963, only holding German language courses in the Dokki villa. The new premises launches with a 36-hour continuous program on October 13 and 14, featuring guests from both Egypt and Germany.

The British Museum's Modern Egypt Project, a year-long pilot program curated by Cairobserver's Mohamed Elshahed that rethinks how the museum collects and exhibits the modern world, launches with a pop-up installation of objects from the past century at downtown Cairo's Kodak Passageway Space from October 12 to 19, including a three-day series of talks from October 14 to 16.

The eighth Cairo Jazz Festival runs from October 20 to 22 at downtown’s GrEEK Campus. Founded by Amro Salah of jazz band Eftekasat, the festival annually brings jazz musicians from around the world to Cairo for concerts and children’s workshops. The lineup this year includes Salah’s project with Noha Fekry, H.O.H, Dina El-Wedidi, and Hamza Namira. International acts include Andromeda Mega Express (Germany), Tara Fuki (Czech Republic), Karmen Roivassepp (Denmark), Saori Yano Quartet (Japan), Ala Ghawas & Likwid (Bahrain), among others.

Cairo Jazz Club is hosting the festival’s after-hours program but also, separately, two interesting international artists: Turkish-German DJ Ipek plays at the club on October 12, and Kuwait-based experimental musician Zahed Sultan on October 13.

November

November has become a big film month in Cairo, and this season's no different.

Every year cinema-loving Cairenes await the annual Panorama of the European Film run by Zawya’s parent company Misr International Films - Youssef Chahine, because it promises 10 days of non-stop screenings of beautifully selected European and regional films. The diverse program takes over several screens, this year from November 2 to 12. Read our past coverage of the Panorama here.

The 38th Cairo International Film Festival takes place between November 15 and 24, with some exciting news already announced. CIFF will again hold screenings outside the Cairo Opera House grounds, a tradition halted since the revolution amid security concerns, encompassing both Odeon and Karim cinemas in downtown Cairo. Two Egyptian films have already been announced for the official competition, including Tamer El-Said’s award winning The Last Days of the City, which has been making international festival runs this year since premiering at the Berlinale. A Day for Women by Kamla Abu Zekry (of TV series such as Women’s Prison and Zaat) is the festival’s opener, which marks Abu Zekry’s return to the silver screen after her acclaimed 2009 debut Wahed Sefr. For a second consecutive year CIFF is headed by Magda Wassef, the first female president since it started in 1976, with critic Youssef Rizkallah as artistic director and actor Mahmoud Hemeida honorary president. Check out past CIFF coverage here.

Medrar’s annual Cairo Video Festival has been pushed forward to February to escape film saturation this fall, but in November its space is doing the "soft launch" of the festival's important and much-anticipated Cairo Video Archive. Developed over the past year using thousands of films submitted and screened over CVF's eight editions, the archive is set to be a haven for academics, artists, researchers and experimental film and video fans. The general public will have access to the platform hosting the content by the start of 2017.

The third chapter in the Contemporary Image Collective’s long-term contemporary art project around imprisonment, addressing both institutionalized forms of imprisonment (jails, migrant detention centers, mental hospitals) and other forms of social exclusion, is held this November. Previous chapters centered around two exhibitions: Greetings to Those Who Asked About Me (2015) and Chronic (2016), with parallel talks and screenings.

And a final note on our own activities

As art spaces and cultural operators gear up for a new season, Mada Masr is also launching a new series of monthly events at After Eight: Karaoke nightsfeaturing both Arabic and English pop songs. This is in addition to our ongoing monthly playlist nights, where musicians and Mada contributors volunteer to DJ, and a big third birthday bash in December. Stay tuned.