Absa Art Hot Spot
Empowering African fine arts
Artist Bio
Nourhan Maayouf is an Egyptian visual artist, her work is mostly autobiographical, representing her generation of middle-class Egyptian females under socio-political influences. In the form of self-portraits, performances, and installations, she explores issues of gender and home, covering topics such as displacement, dreams for independence and contemporary relationship issues.
Maayouf has participated in many local and international group exhibitions such as Addis Foto Festival in 2018 and Cairo Video Festival in 2019. As well as winning local and regional awards, most prominently is Absa L’Atelier award in South Africa, topping one hundred African artists in contemporary art in 2016. She is currently studying Arts in Public Spheres MA program in EDHEA (école de design et haute école d'art du Valais), in Switzerland.
Artist Statement
An online interactive performance, calling young emerging female visual artists in quarantine from around the world to join for an hour video call to squeeze lemons and chat. Discussions have been opened about how artists spend their time during quarantine, how they see the future of art during the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak and for how long they think the situation shall last. Participating artists are from Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
The online performance calls for solidarity and connection despite isolation; this is due to the shape of relationships having changed since the spread of Covid19 virus. Governments have called people to stay home, to limit the spread of the virus, as well as maintaining social distance even with close ones. Thus, our relationship with our family and friends have become digitized in the form of video calls.
The performance questions the effectiveness and the limit of online relationships. For example, to what extent can online video calls replace real life meetings? And how effective is bonding with people that we meet online for the first time?