#elnabrawy

“We read human actions as signs that point to meanings and feelings We follow signposts that direct us to where we want to go We search for signs that predict an event in our future We respect a sign that forbids us to do a certain thing We ignore signs we don’t want to see We react to signals We make signs We signalize A sign can be the action or the entity that points to the meaning, the presence or the occurrence of something else. By making sense of signs we shape our own reality. How can I play with the idea of being between what is being pointed to and what is being understood?” Performance by: Georgia Begbie Composition: Peter Hinz Townhouse is pleased to invite you to an open studio event featuring artist Georgia Begbie. The event will start by the artist showing a part of the performance she has been working on during her one-month residency at the Townhouse where she started researching how the physical body can express signs, distort space and interpret its own signs, followed by a talk with the artist about her project and her work process over some Ramadan drinks and bites. The open studio sessions are a series of informal meetings that take place at the Townhouse studios. The sessions invite the public to one of our studios where artists in residency discuss their research process and showcase their work to the public. About the artist: Georgia Begbie is a recent graduate of the Fontys School of Arts in Tilburg (Netherlands), where she studied Dance Arts in Context from 2014 to 2018, spending her final year working as an intern dancer with Dutch-based choreographers such as Marina Mascarell, Guilherme Miotto and The100Hands. In August 2018, Georgia moved to Germany where she joined the "La_Trottier Dance Collective" and worked with Canadian choreographer Eric Trottier on their most recent production 1,618033, which premiered in "EinTanzHaus" in Mannheim on November. Currently, she is focusing on creating and developing her own work, which has included this residency at Townhouse for the past month, allowing her to research and explore first ideas for a future performance project. About the program: The Townhouse Residency program aims to provide studio spaces for independent artistic research, experimentation and production, offering 10 newly furnished studios for national and international artists, curators and writers pursuing independent projects.

Wednesday, May 29th, 9:00 pm Third floor, #Townhouse_residency 10. El Nabrawy st. off Champollion, Qasr an Nile, Downtown, Cairo

“Nature! We are encircled and enclasped by her — powerless to depart from her, and powerless to find our way more deeply into her being.  Without invitation and without warning she involves us in the orbit of her dance and drives us onward until we are exhausted and fall from her arm. […] We live in the midst of her, and yet to her, we are alien.  She parleys incessantly with us, and to us, she does not disclose her secret.  We influence her perpetually, and yet we have no power over her.”* Walking against the wind, breathing through the sand, and running to save time. Man is always indulged in his surrounding, capsuled in constant movement. … being a part of it and being out of it, our relationship with nature is dominated by the challenge of ‘to control or to be controlled’ as if the total integration of man and nature is impossible Morgane Erpen explores in this exhibition the relationship between man and nature through material explorations. The artist experiments with different materials to create an immersive experience for the spectator. Arriving in Egypt, she was taken by the sand storms, Reyah El Khamasseen, yellowing the sky of Cairo.  The sand as her main inspiration makes the greatest part of her work in its different shapes. The work presents the contrast she found while searching for the materials in Cairo, between the traditional process of hand blowing glass and the industrial plastic that is very present in various forms in the everyday life. Is manipulating the “material” our way of giving ourselves a sense of authority over what controls us? *Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ode to Nature.