Art Alert: August’s Rooms duo exhibit at Cairo’s Soma Gallery
Ahram Online, Wednesday 23 Jan 2019
Mona Essam ElDin and Nesreen Mamdouh follow in the wake of schizophrenic German artist August Natterer, examining the conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind


August’s Rooms, an exhibition by two artists, Mona Essam ElDin and Nesreen Mamdouh, will open at Soma Gallery 30 January.

The exhibition is an exploration of the mind— both the conscious and unconscious aspects of it.

Both artists were inspired by the work of the schizophrenic German artist August Natterer and his infamous April Fool's Day hallucination; a strong vision that inspired an intense production of 10,000 images in efforts to recapture it.

Natterer’s “Art of schizophrenia” was one of the first attempts to present the unorthodox world of the human psyche.

Both artists follow in his wake, examining the mind beyond the limitations of reason.

Essam ElDin graduated from the Faculty of Art Education, Helwan University, in 2010, where she also obtained her Masters degree from the Department of Drawing and Painting in 2016.

In most of her artworks she experiments with numerous mediums, between drawing, painting, printing and illustration.

ElDin earned the first place award in the human rights exhibition at the Faculty of Art Education in 2008, and the Roznama 5 Award by Medrar Gallery in 2016, which gave her an exhibition at Soma Gallery.

Mamdouh is a 2010 graduate of the Helwan Faculty of Fine Arts. She went on to obtain a postgraduate diploma in animation from the Higher Institute of Cinema in 2013, and is currently pursuing a Masters degree.

She won the Youth Salon’s commissioner award for her installation titled Uncontainable in the 29th Youth Salon. The same project was also featured in the First International Video Art Forum.

Mamdouh’s short experimental animation On White II won first place at the Global Forum for Animation, as well as at the Forsan Festival, in addition to the jury award of the Mohamed Abla Prize for Animated Films.

Programme:
Opening on Wednesday, 30 January at 7pm and runs till 27 February
SOMA Art School and Gallery Exhibition, 3 Al-Adel Abou Baker Square, 3rd floor, Apartment 9, Zamalek, Cairo

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