In the News

Along the Nile

Published in NY Arts Magazine
By Horace Brockington

Cairo's contemporary art scene emerged in 1995, and has since then been offering expounded new forms of visual communication in a rather traditional society. In modern day Cairo, a combination of the very old and the very new, finds its restatement in the art of a new generation of young artists, encouraged and supported by private initiatives...

Artists now start finding new means for production and presentation, dismissing the significance of qualitative judgment in cultural production and policy. Slowly they are gaining international support, including Foreign Cultural Institutions, Ford Foundation, the Dutch Fund for Culture, Pro-Helvetia, and Goethe Institut. In Cairo only a handful of private galleries defy the decorative and commercial, and Townhouse Gallery is one of them. The Townhouse Gallery was founded in 1998 on the first floor of a dilapidated building from the turn of the century on the edge of the downtown area, which still bears the traces of its past as the Paris of the Orient in the heart of Cairo's mechanics' district. It has become one of the most exciting and novel sites for contemporary arts. Townhouse itself has evolved since its inception. Never a traditional gallery space, Townhouse has largely grown in relation to the needs of the community around it. Townhouse serves as a platform for those artists who would otherwise not have access to one, theater groups who are in need of rehearsal space, filmmakers and video makers, whose entries make it into the monthly film programs.

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