My Nineties: A Panorama of Collective Memory Televised
01 - 17 Apr 2013
MY NINETIES: A PANORAMA OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY TELEVISED
Documentary film, book, video installations and Audiovisual performance
1 - 17 April 2013
On view at the Townhouse First Floor Gallery from April 1 to April 17, My Nineties is an art project that addresses the era of the nineties through a multi-disciplinary presentation, a book that documents some of what has been already written in the newspapers, magazines and research papers about the Egyptian television in this era. The project also includes the production of a documentary film featuring some of the symbols of the media industry of this era. A video installation and an audiovisual live performance will also take place. Through more than 4000 VHS tapes that have been collected from different scrap stores, random individuals and sellers in the Friday market in Cairo, Mohammad Allam was able to dig into the collective memory of the Egyptians over the last few decades. He was able to locate around 200 tapes with different recordings of TV materials from the nineties. These tapes sometimes carefully collected, while other times carelessly stored, constitute an accumulation of efforts that started individually, but then ended collectively. The existence of this material is, thus, not a result of meticulous digital lab work that took place in modern specialists’ labs. Rather, this is a product of a popular passion with the recording of TV programs, soap operas that flooded our TV screens in the nineties, and then re-used to record other TV programs, movies, plays or even family weddings. The owners of this collections of recordings were not concerned with copyrighting their collected materials nor did they expect the growth of an open archive of Egyptian collective memory. “My Nineties” exhibition includes video installations presenting the found VHS tapes (some screened raw and others remixed using the same analogue techniques used in the nineties) and an accompanying live audiovisual performance on the opening night using the found footage as a source material performed by Mohamed Allam and Rami Abadir. A documentary by Emad Maher featuring the icons of the 90s media industry will be screened, and the launch of a book by Hassan al-Helougy based on newspaper and magazine articles and scholarly texts examining the role of television during this decade.
Documentary film, book, video installations and Audiovisual performance
1 - 17 April 2013
On view at the Townhouse First Floor Gallery from April 1 to April 17, My Nineties is an art project that addresses the era of the nineties through a multi-disciplinary presentation, a book that documents some of what has been already written in the newspapers, magazines and research papers about the Egyptian television in this era. The project also includes the production of a documentary film featuring some of the symbols of the media industry of this era. A video installation and an audiovisual live performance will also take place. Through more than 4000 VHS tapes that have been collected from different scrap stores, random individuals and sellers in the Friday market in Cairo, Mohammad Allam was able to dig into the collective memory of the Egyptians over the last few decades. He was able to locate around 200 tapes with different recordings of TV materials from the nineties. These tapes sometimes carefully collected, while other times carelessly stored, constitute an accumulation of efforts that started individually, but then ended collectively. The existence of this material is, thus, not a result of meticulous digital lab work that took place in modern specialists’ labs. Rather, this is a product of a popular passion with the recording of TV programs, soap operas that flooded our TV screens in the nineties, and then re-used to record other TV programs, movies, plays or even family weddings. The owners of this collections of recordings were not concerned with copyrighting their collected materials nor did they expect the growth of an open archive of Egyptian collective memory. “My Nineties” exhibition includes video installations presenting the found VHS tapes (some screened raw and others remixed using the same analogue techniques used in the nineties) and an accompanying live audiovisual performance on the opening night using the found footage as a source material performed by Mohamed Allam and Rami Abadir. A documentary by Emad Maher featuring the icons of the 90s media industry will be screened, and the launch of a book by Hassan al-Helougy based on newspaper and magazine articles and scholarly texts examining the role of television during this decade.