“Cairo is my body, and my body is Cairo.”
Sherif El-Azma
“Eudoxia spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city’s true form. …
the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.”
Italo Calvino
Sherif El-Azma’s work questions the ready inscription of tradition upon and through media language, particularly its Egyptian variants, and is keen to understand how history is layered through representations of city space. For the past few years, Sherif El Azma has been contributing to an evolving and collaborative project entitled The Psycho-Geography of Loose Associations which weaves its way through text, photography, diary entries, diagrams, fiction, video footage and the informational lecture format. Of central concern within this work are the social dynamics, modes of cultural integration and organisational systems operating within cosmopolitan environments, particularly those of Cairo s new quarters.
El Azma’s work has been shown at institutions and events as varied as: the Venice Biennial (Egypt Pavilion), the Camden Arts Centre, Ashkal Alwan and the Zico House, Beirut, HAU Berlin, Witte De Witte Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Meeting Points Festival, Brussels, Bethanien, Berlin, the Alexandria Library, the Modern Art Museum, Kiel and the Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo. El Azma worked with Nermine El-Ansari on a contribution to the Transit 1 show at the Museo Madre, Naples and his work was part of the Taswir exhibition at Gropius-Bau, Berlin and the Sharjah Biennial 9, Something Else – Off Biennial Cairo, a.o.