Localité .:.

Hanan El Sheikh & Khaled Akl – Malak El Shazly – Nihal Wahby

Localité is a revelation towards the way things appear nowadays on our streets. The everyday commute, the altitudes of space, a frame of mind with its innermost depths. We have invited a selective group of painters who capture the crowded squares, the scattered neighborhoods from within their mundane trafficking of affairs. Nihal Wahby captures the distant observer who stands from amongst the crowds, witnessing their chants and their cries; Malak El Shazly is dominated by a combination of landscapes, figures, and the occasional hidden text. Detracting the focus from the identity of the place itself, El-Shazly spotlights the features that endure across cultures and across places. In this collection, El Shazly provides an assortment of contexts; slums and cities, movement and stagnation, modernity and simplicity. Hanan El Sheikh collaborates for the first time with the public artist and painter Khaled Akl. Contrasting her subject matter from matchsticks to parked bicycles, does she now contextualize her work into the landscapes offered by Akl’s backdrops. The “downtown” context has changed in its value and meaning making their work the most literal perceptions of change to a capital’s heartbeat.