Your Survival Guide To The 21st Century

Curated by: Hana El Beblawy
Exhibition text by: Dina Jereidini

Your Survival Guide to the 21st Century is a duo exhibition showcasing the work of artists Dina Jereidini and Rodeina Fouad. 

The show takes on the rapidly changing landscape of the 21st century, exploring an ever-present and seemingly never-ending sense of compression. As meteoric developments in technology, communications and transportation condense our sense of scale, micro and macro become one, compressing time and space into a single expression. A constant state of acceleration leaves nothing in its wake, and a metamorphosis of the boundary between the personal and the public begins. The human body starts to be seen as space-in-itself; to be abstracted, surveilled, utilized, and simulated. Simultaneously, the landscape is also seen as space to be overcome, reformulated and rebuilt. 

In this new world, construction and deconstruction become ways of bridging the gaps of time, aiding in the general drive towards telescopic compression, guiding it. What is valuable and what is not is renegotiated and seemingly arbitrarily redrawn, as a rapid doing-away with the old makes way for newer, better ways of doing what has always been done – of socializing, of moving, of working, of living. What is being reevaluated to fit within these new and arbitrary constraints? What is this reconstruction laying waste to in its wake? What has managed to survive?

Exploring these lived conditions of contemporaneity, the artists showcase their personal investigations into concepts of selfhood, identity, attachment, loss, and ideology. Informed by this new state of fractured survival, they outline vivid relationships between the self and the landscape, asking how we produce and maintain our own self hoods, and why we might choose to maintain certain notions that shape our external worlds.

Artist Tour

A tour with the artists who exhibited in “Your Survival Guide To The 21st Century”, Dina Jeredini and Rodeina Fouad