Tag Archives: egypt

Hassan Fathy

CASA ÁRABE MADRID. Hassan Fathy: a contracorriente

 

28/01 – 16/05/2021

 

 

 

A partir del 28 de enero, Casa Árabe ofrece en Madrid la exposición Hassan Fathy: a contracorriente, comisariada por José Tono Martínez, en la que se recogen planos, maquetas, fotografías y libros del conocido como “el arquitecto de los pobres”. En este marco, se presentarán algunas obras de Hannah Collins y su visión personal del arquitecto, incluyendo el video I will make up a song and sing it in a theatre with night air above my head.

 

 

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As of January 28, Casa Árabe offers in Madrid the exhibition Hassan Fathy: a contracorriente (against the current), curated by José Tono Martínez, in which plans, models, photographs and books by the “architect of the poor” are collected. In this context, some works by Hannah Collins will be presented, along with her personal vision of the architect, including the video I will make up a song and sing it in a theatre with night air above my head

 

 

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Teresa Solar, Ride ride ride

26.10.2019 – 26.01.2020

Index (Stockholm)

 

Teresa Solar works with objects and the space in between them, with narratives and broken information. Solar experiments with textures and physicality understanding art as a situation to discover, feel and think. Her exhibited objects can be sculpture and also set material, can be produced or found but is in the conjunction that the whole group becomes a para-linguistic structure with internal dialogues in several timelines.

 

In her exhibition, Teresa Solar is mixing classic Egyptian mythology, details of contemporary history and linguistic theory: A sculpture of Nut – the goddess of the night in pharaonic Egypt – becomes the axis of the space at Index Foundation and a partner in a dialogue with plenty of references. Curro, the mascot of the universal exhibition in Sevilla 1992, with its bright colors and cartoonish design, is divided in fragments of memory and disappearance. A killer whale becoming a children’s game and a stretched tiger show the porosity and elasticity of objects, nodding the capacity of art to define other ways of relating to them and modifying its signification. A canoe with a new layer of paint is now an eye, a body, an openness. And still a canoe. Gestures become objects and games, objects become unwritten words and sensual connections, lapses of time offering the next experience to be discovered.

 

André Malraux had with his imaginary museum a collection of images to construct meaning: many possible museum narratives where waiting to be built from the selected photographs collected at Malraux’s archive. What happens when instead of possible images what we have is real objects? Can objects become the museum and not just the idea of the museum? Is the museum a physical experience? Can objects disappear while becoming a museum experience? Can objects become a trigger for memory? To visit an exhibition is a confrontation with hidden languages and bits of information and, still, a visual and performative contact with colors and surfaces.

 

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I will make up a song (desert entrance-1), 2018

 

Opening March 14th, 7 pm | Exhibition March – May 2019

 

Next Thursday, March 14th we will open the sixth exhibition by Hannah Collins at Galeria Joan Prats, where we will present her most recent work I will make up a song, 2018; along with The Fertile Forest, 2013-5 project and the photograph Family, 1988.

 

The title for this exhibition is a part of the title for Hannah Collins’s new film, I will make up a song and sing it in a theatre with the night air above my head, created with musician Duncan Bellamy, which will be shown at Fundació Tàpies next June.

 

I will make up a song talks about the work of the Egyptian Modernist architect Hassan Fathy (1900-1989), who drew on traditional sustainable mud constructions to create new towns New Gurna and New Baris. Fathy tried to find a new way forward through sustainable practice, using natural earth materials, and to create a new context where a theatre would be a normal part of rural life in a country with ancient roots. His ideas have urgency today, as we look for a sustainable future. Through these images, Hannah Collins explores the relationship between human body, scale and history, and shows the modest but meaningful materials she encountered while making the work in the Egyptian desert.

 

Finding new ways forward is one of the central themes of Hannah Collins’s exhibition created at a time of global focus on the choices and forces at place in contemporary Western existence.

 

The Fertile Forest is a work that also deals with tradition and the need to establish new relationships with our environment. It is an ongoing project to document the way a tribal group understand the surrounding forest, which is in fact more like a garden as they use over a thousand plants for their everyday wellbeing. Hannah Collins spent a month with the Cofán tribe in the remote Colombian Amazon basin, photographing the plants according to their teachings. The texts accompanying the photographs are the result of Hannah Collins’s conversations with the leader of the tribe under the influence of yagé (ayahuasca). The mirrored vitrines contain gold mirror that reflects us back at ourselves through the plants.

 

The earliest Family is a black-and-white image of a group of silent speakers that were commonly used for street music, especially reggae, created by West Indian in London, but which were photographed in Hannah Collins’s studio.

 

The exhibition gives an anxious but simultaneously optimistic view of our times and our need to preserve knowledge and created bridges at a global scale. All the works focus on the act of communication and the desire for poetry and beauty. The work of Hannah Collins makes visible the need for the preservation of meaning and nature, both threatened by their invisibility.

 

 

Hannah Collins (London, 1956). From 1989 to 2010, she lived and worked in Barcelona, exhibiting at Galeria Joan Prats since 1992, and today lives between London and Almeria, Spain. In addition to having obtained the Fulbright scholarship and having been nominated for the 1993 Turner Prize, she has recently received the SPECTRUM 2015 International Photography Prize, awarded by the Foundation of the Lower Saxony, which included an exhibition at the Sprengel Museum, travelling to the Camden Art Centre in London and the Baltic Centre in Newcastle. Among other museums and art centres, she has exhibited at Centre Pompidou Paris; FRAC Bretagne; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Museo UNAL, Bogotá; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; MUDAM Luxembourg; Tate Modern, London; Seoul Museum of Art; VOX image contemporaine, Montreal; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Fundació La Caixa, Madrid and Barcelona; La Laboral, Gijón; Artium, Vitoria; CAC, Málaga.

 

For more information and images, please contact galeria@galeriajoanprats.com