Arts in the City

This module explores how the arts shape socio-cultural urban life through two lenses: visual arts and performance arts. The visual arts component examines how murals, street art, and site-specific interventions help us interpret, navigate, and reimagine urban space, using the city’s surfaces to engage local narratives and activate overlooked or contested places.
The performance arts component investigates the relationship between the built environment and our bodies and inner worlds asking how streets, squares, bridges, homes, and neighborhoods influence the stories we tell about ourselves.

Instructors

Agnes Michalczyk is a Polish-Austrian visual artist and educator living and working in Cairo. Graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig where she studied painting and printmaking she teaches at the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Arts at the German University in Cairo. Her work explores the urban space of Cairo through a female perspective focusing on the city and its narratives, real or imagined. She works in a variety of media, painting, drawing, and collage, between 2012-2016 mainly focusing on Street Art and since 2014 increasingly incorporating New Media in her practice contributing to different art projects in Cairo and abroad. Agnes is currently pursuing her doctoral research on immersive media and heritage in historic Cairo at Freie Universität Berlin and The University of Edinburgh.

Chirine El Ansary is an accomplished storyteller, performance artist, and researcher, born in Cairo. She holds a PhD in Practice-as-Research and an MA in Performance Making from Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Theatre and Performance. Chirine also studied theatre at the American University in Cairo and the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School in Paris. Her work delves into the fusion of words and movement to create immersive atmospheres, evoke deep emotions, and craft vivid imagery. Central to her performances is the exploration of how people interact with the spaces they occupy, as well as the delicate boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary, memory and imagination.

rana elnemr's practice is anchored in questioning what it means to live & experience place and time. Her process incorporates formal image-making techniques with contemporary art & strives to integrate various forms of collaborations & alternative pedagogical practices. rana elnemr's work has been exhibited & acquired world-wide. In 2004, she was one of the founders of the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) of which she remains an active board member.

Samir El Kordy is an architect based in Cairo, Egypt. He graduated from the Architectural Department in Cairo University. Samir El Kordy developed work in a wide spectrum of fields such as object design, research, architecture, urban design, and art exhibition design. He has worked for OMA/Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, and Herzog & de Meuron in Basel. In Cairo, El Kordy has realized a number of projects and has collaborated with CDC/Abdel Halim Ibrahim in major architectural initiatives in Egypt and the Arab Region. His practice includes a range of realized architectural and urban, theoretical, research-based projects in New York, Paris, Munich, London, Rotterdam, Saint Louis, Saint Petersburg, Dubai, Ibb, Riyadh and Cairo. He was the design architect for the exhibition at Haus der Kunst, Munich “The Future of Tradition and The Tradition of Future” 2010-2011.