|
| Hala Elkoussy |
|
|
 |
|
|
Born 1974 in Cairo, Egypt; Elkoussy lives and works in Cairo and Amsterdam.
In her work, Elkoussy exposes intimate, seemingly banal and overlooked sides of communal living. She methodically collects personal accounts, interviews and media reports to weave an apparently endless web of stories that hover between fact and fiction. These compositions unveil central questions related to the daily experience of life in a big city: How is such a city's topography navigated on a daily basis? How and what marks are left on its permeable history? And most crucially, how does one negotiate an individual position among the masses, under the overbearing pressures of consumerism, social normality and political apathy? Elkoussy is most interested in events and places that bear the signs of the individual’s capacity to interrupt the collective flow; the sum of individual 'interruptions' set a higher overall order that defies restrictions of geography, social norms and economics. Disorientation and excess are Elkoussy's means for producing unauthoritative knowledge to counteract the mega-narratives of the overarching State and Media.
In 2002, Elkoussy completed an MA in Image and Communication at Goldsmiths College, University of London and between 2002 and 2003 she lectured on photography at the American University in Cairo. In 2004, she co-founded the Contemporary Image Collective - CiC, an artist independent initiative dedicated to photography and video, based in Cairo. In 2007, she completed a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Her work has been shown internationally and selected exhibitions include Global Cities, Tate Modern, London; peripheral and other stories, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam; Snap Judgments, the international Centre for Photography, New York; Port City, Arnolfini, Bristol; The Maghreb Connection, Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Land of Human Rights, Rotor: Association for Contemporary Art, Graz; Alles Klar?, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; Geopoliticas De La Animacion, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla; Coding, Decoding, Kunsthallen Nikolaj, Copenhagen; Focus Agypten, Past/Present, Kunstverein Hildesheim; and in 2005 she participated in the 9th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey.
|
|
