Unbearable Horizons
Solo Exhibition by Mohamed Abdelkarim
08.10.2024 - 03.11.2024
This exhibition, Unbearable Horizons, presents three recent works by Mohamed Abdelkarim. It features two works produced between 2021 and 2024, alongside an installation version of the ongoing performance work Blue Gaze at the Future.
The three works share fragmented fiction-narratives that complicate the relationship between notions of body, performativity, language, and the effects of defeat, grief, and hope. By revisiting historical events and speculating on future crises, Abdelkarim approaches mediums such as drawing, moving images and spatial works as performative practices staging unseen bodies, blurry landscapes and audible voices.
The visibility of texts and words is a prominent feature in Abdelkarim’s works, where narrative and drama are integral components. Narrative serves as a fundamental apparatus for world-building and speculative fiction, shaping how fictional realms are constructed. In this process, he produces fiction and exposes how fiction is produced.
The works traverse various geographical spheres—desert, coal mine, and river—where each serves as a backdrop that frames their narratives. These landscape elements are stages for physical, metaphysical, and psychological exploration, where the defeated history becomes visible and new possibilities emerge within a fictional realm.
About the artist: Mohamed Abdelkarim
Mohamed Abdelkarim lives and works between Cairo, Rotterdam and Vienna where he is currently PhD candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, Austria.
Abdelkarim is a visual artist, performer and cultural producer. After completing his M.A. at ECAV/Edhea, Switzerland, 2016 he turned towards producing text-based performances and became committed to performative practices based on multidisciplinary research, employing and reflecting on narrating, singing, detecting, doing, fictioning, and speculating.
In Abdelkarim’s performative works, the script bears witness to the research experience. The emphasis is on the process, as a reflection on production and cultural genealogy. This process is open-ended, and non-linear. His current umbrella project focuses on the agency of the landscape as a witness to “a history we missed and a future we have not yet attended”
His performances have been included in Guild Master of Cabaret Voltaire, Manifesta 11, Zurich, 2016; Sofia Underground Performance Art Festival, Bulgaria, 2016; Photo Cairo 6th, Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), Egypt, 2017; Live Works Performance Act Award Vol. 5, 37° Edizione Drodesera, Trento, Italy, 2017; At the Crossroads of Different Pasts, Presents and Futures, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy, 2018; Interazioni Festival, Rome, Italy, 2022; and Festival Internazionale della Performance, Performative 04, at MAXXI L’Aquila, 2024. As part of his performative practice, he established “Live Praxes”, a performance encounter that includes workshops, seminars, and performance nights.
AUC Student Visit
Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting senior students from the Visual Arts Department at the American University in Cairo. They visited Mohamed Abdelkarim’s exhibition, “Unbearable Horizons”, along with their mentor, artist and art professor Bassem Yousri.
