In my painting, I use imagery of body perfection, and treat them to reflect metamorphosis and the movement from one state to another. For the male figures I appropriate images of body builders, and for the female figures I use images extracted from advertising and from cheesy commercial tabloids. The images are enlarged archival color […]

Born in 1977 in Assiut, Basim Magdi lives and works in Cairo. He received his BFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University in 2000. At a time when the relevance of painting is continuously questioned, and as new mediums advance, Basim Magdi has found the means to fuse to modernism and […]

My work is an ongoing process of accumulating, interpreting, and re-interpreting my archive of images, a broken and fragmented memory, which I try to “fix.” Whilst my name “Baladi” literally means in Arabic “my country,” a lack of roots is inherent to my identity. This absence, or perhaps abundance, of roots is at the core […]

Sebastiano Mauri Sebastiano Mauri lives and works between Buenos Aires and Milan. The concern for identity is present throughout his work. From the different artistic approaches and techniques he uses—painting, photography, and video—Mauri makes us think about the prejudices that affect us, in an almost automatic way, and dangerously limit us in our way of […]

Arab zones really do seem to be very “hot” at the moment. Not just because of war, occupation, and the clashes between the Palestinians and Israelis in the Gaza Strip, which dramatically marked the beginning of 2009 with the death of over 1,200 people, but also, fortunately, in a more positive sense, because warmth and […]

Four years ago, I grew increasingly interested in street photography, in order to probe the meaning of cities as a general entity. I would try to explore surfaces and textures of cities within the context of global urbanism, in which displays of consumption and spectacle define everyday happenings through different mediums, such as graffiti art. […]

Cairo is the last living medieval city in the world. It bursts with 20 million people along a narrow fertile strip along the Nile, 20 million people who somehow manage to live inside an organized chaos. Archaeologists affirm that there are more standing 10th- to 17th-century buildings in this city than anywhere else in the […]

Stéphane Ducret is best known for his paintings of stenciled cut-out designs adhered to cotton canvases dipped in white vinyl. But Ducret possesses a wide range of artistic output, using a combination of techniques and media, including digital photography, painting, or sculptural relief. Ducret’s earliest work, The Rebirth of Cool series, was created in New […]

My art is, first of all, the consequence of the joy of playing. When I was a kid I loved to draw; I represented my family and everything around me. I also played with my sister’s dolls. TV was a huge influence; I developed my drawing inspired by the comics as well as all the […]

My practice involves a series of experiences taking place mostly in the public space. To do so I use street actions, installations and performances, organization of events, or interventions in the media, strategies that are points of departure of what a work might become. I usually seek the collaboration and participation of people that come […]