Since its launch in 2024, the AUC Tahrir CultureFest has evolved into a key cultural event that highlights Cairo’s rich artistic and intellectual heritage while engaging with its global relevance. This year’s edition spotlights the future of Cairo under the theme Future C-AI-RO,” exploring how tradition and technology will intersect in shaping Cairo’s urban and cultural landscape.
“This year’s theme invites us to reflect together on the kind of city we want Cairo to become,” said Ahmad Dallal, AUC President, during his opening remarks. “On how we can shape our future responsibly, building on our history while contributing to innovation and new ways of thinking.”
Running over three days until 4 April, the festival offers a diverse lineup of activities, including panel discussions, artistic installations, workshops, live performances, and interactive experiences. “The festival brings together artists, scholars, students, and partners from across Cairo and beyond that explore the many dimensions of the city’s future,” Dallal added.
He highlighted the connection between the festival’s theme and AUC’s academic mission, emphasizing the university’s active engagement with questions of technology, artificial intelligence, creativity, and entrepreneurship in service of a more inclusive and sustainable urban future.
Dallal also underscored the significance of the festival’s setting.
“The Khairy Pasha Palace is a space that has stood at the heart of downtown Cairo since the 19th century and has been part of AUC’s programs for over a century,” he said. “This campus has brought people together for blending, dialogue, and cultural exchange. Today, we continue to build on this legacy.”
Noting that it represents the balance between heritage and innovation that the festival celebrates, he added: “A recent restoration of the palace façade reflects a careful balance between preservation and renewal, addressing years of wear, restoring architectural details, and ensuring that this space remains active and accessible for future generations.”
The official opening ceremony was attended by distinguished guests, ambassadors, partners, cultural representatives, public figures, writers, and members of the AUC community. And it kicked off with the launch of four distinct exhibitions, set to run throughout the festival.
The Margo Veillon Gallery hosts two exhibitions: I Don’t Know Who I Am Anymore by Hassan Ragab, and Time Will Tell, co-curated by Hana El Beblawy and Malak Shenouda, featuring works by Agnes Michalczyk, Ahmed Magdy Abdullah, Karim Fouad, Nelly El Sharkawy, and Omar Kayal.
Ragab, an interdisciplinary designer, artist, and storyteller, explores in his exhibition how artificial intelligence is learning to interpret Cairo’s visual culture. Through a series of immersive digital projections, featuring surreal moving images such as floating pyramids and huge buildings that appear to walk and collide.
The work traces a four-year journey in which AI and personal emotion intersect. It serves as a visual timeline, reflecting both the evolution of AI-generated imagery and the artist’s shifting sense of identity, while highlighting the gap between human memory and machine interpretation.
Time Will Tell brings together artists and AI to imagine possible futures for Cairo. The works on display consider the environmental, technological, and cultural forces shaping the city today, offering multiple visions of what lies ahead.
Agnieszka Michalczyk, a Polish artist and academic lecturer living and working in Cairo, presents a VR work exploring the city’s urban transformation. The piece invites viewers to take a virtual walk-through alley inspired by Cairo’s historic neighborhoods before moving forward in time into the modern city, where they ascend bridges and confront towering buildings, tracing the layered evolution of Cairo’s landscape.
Anah: Conversations with AI is a bilingual, multimedia exhibition by artist Samia Mehrez and multimedia expert Amr Ali that explores the emotional and ethical dimensions of human–AI collaboration. The exhibition features sculptural works made from recycled materials such as plastic bottles, alongside interactive projections, sound, and AI-generated text that responds in real time. At its center is “Anah,” an AI persona whose name reflects the Arabic word for “I,” giving technology a more personal and tangible presence.
Mehrez drew inspiration from conversations between her son, Nadim Jacquemond, and AI. The work raises the question of what happens when fiction, authorship, and emotion are produced through dialogue within an algorithmic system, inviting viewers to reflect on the blurred boundaries between human creativity and artificial intelligence.
The fourth exhibition, Future C—AI—RO, at the AUC Legacy Gallery showcases visual identity concepts developed by AUC students as part of their Logo and Visual Identity course. Working in teams, the students created strategic ideas and design proposals inspired by the festival’s theme, Future Cairo.
The opening ceremony concluded with the short projection light show Whispers of the Walls, which tells the historic story of Khairy Pasha Palace and its transformation into the AUC campus. The show traces the building’s journey, from its original sketches and construction to its role today as a vibrant center of learning and culture.
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