"Following a three-month residency in Cairo at the beginning of 2010 (see previous entries on the blog), I put together a programme of videos by Middle Eastern artists entitled The Presidents: Remix, which was first shown in Geneva in June 2010.
"Many of the young artists I met in Egypt have only ever known one president, Mubarak, who has been in power for three decades. In recent years a number of artists have started to salvage or restage archival images of the three long-term Egyptian presidents Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak and critically explore the relationships between memory, event, authority and representation.
"The momentous events unfolding in Egypt since 25 January 2011 have been accompanied by extensive media coverage. They have also prompted me to revisit these video works and I was struck especially by those daring enough to address the contemporary situation in Egypt and Mubarak’s reign. (Khaled Hafez’ Of Presidents & Super-Heroes was censored from an exhibition in Cairo in February 2010). Both Khaled Hafez’ and Raed Yassin’s works take on new significance, resonating powerfully and in unexpected ways in the midst of what is happening in Egypt now."
- Uriel Orlow, 9 February 2011
All films courtesy of the artists.
On the LUX blog you can also watch an interview by Celine Condorelli with Jean-Marie Straub about Too Early, Too Late (1981), a groundbreaking film about Egypt's revolutionary history
Videos in this exhibition /
Inge Lise Hansen
