It’s going to be difficult for you to like mahraganat if you’re the kind of person who asks the waiter in the sheesha place for the plastic thingy that they…
The year is 2048. Donia Nour awakes from her nightly sleep along with greater Egypt’s other 124 million citizens as the call for dawn prayer erupts into their minds.
We figured, if we’re all going to be cooped up in our houses, we might as well be cooped up in a music studio where we can create, jam rather…
That popular culture is an expression of the voice of the people is one of the main tenets of “Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial…
Nationalism in Egypt is nothing new. But its current resurgence in the country’s cultural output would certainly cause concern for George Orwell, had he been alive today. “Nationalism,” wrote Orwell,…
There was a very popular television commercial for an Egyptian ceramics company in the early 1990s, which used “demolish your old bathroom” as its catch phrase. This expression then permeated…
The past two weeks brought Akhbar al-Adab, Egypt’s foremost Arabic literary journal, back under the spotlight with the publication of two new issues: “Salvation” and “Against Fascism.” The editorial team…
In 2013, participants in the independent art study program MASS Alexandria faced an uncertain finale to their seven months together.
SINGAPORE – One of the things that first greeted me on the Southeast Asian island in mid-May was a serendipitously familiar image. At a street booth, amid maps, guides, and…
The Queue is evocative of George Orwell’s dystopias, of Kafkaesque surrealism, and of the dark satire of Sonallah Ibrahim’s The Committee, but could perhaps best be described as dystopic realism.
“We still need to protest, but we also urgently need members of the cultural sector to begin to actively engaging in Egyptian cultural policy, in politics.”
"I have a problem with the idea that contemporary art is a Western product and when it comes to Egypt it won't have any audience."
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