Software Upgrade (Publication)
2024

Software Upgrade proposes that between 2014 to 2019 Egypt fell out of a shared global temporality as a foundation for a study of images. This book publishes early conversations with six artists about their practice, relation to time, modes of listening, community, and the body as a starting point for that query.

Publication

Conversations with Zeina Aly, Castell Lanko, nasa4nasa, Omar El Sadek, Hend Samir, and Yazan El Zubi
Edited by Malak Helmy
Published by Gypsum Books
Designed by Engy Aly

Software Upgrade (Exhibition)
2023

Software Upgrade brackets a period of time in Egypt between the last transmission of protest in 2013 and a new transmission of order in 2021 with the Golden Mummy Parade. The gap of years between them it describes as a semiotic lapse; a non-visual realm more akin to noise, scrambling individual legibility and linear temporality, where sense is more aural and somatic. While this period is known for sonic turn to cultural production how did it reorder concepts of vision and images? Software Upgrade look at visual artworks across a variety of media made at the end of this period as transcriptions from another order, ecology or technology, that make us rethink how we read images and understand a shift in our present.

Curated Exhibition

Works by Zeina Aly, Castell Lanko, nasa4nasa, Omar El Sadek, Hend Samir, Yazan El Zubi
Curated by Malak Helmy

Software Upgrade (Essay - V1)
2021

Counter to Mark Fisher’s theory on “the slow cancellation of the future” this essay explores the possibility of lapses in ordered time from which emerge works offering a morality of technology from outside the enframing logic of neoliberalism. An earlier version of an ongoing study.

Essay

In I Hear a Future: Producing Time and Meaning
through Music in Egypt and Beyond
Edited by Maha El Nabawi
Published by MadaMasr

Your Blood Might Boil
2019

Rosalind Nashashibi’s sci-fi short, Part Two: The moon nearly at the full. The team horse goes astray. and its use of the i-ching, time travel, paintings and friends, becomes a prism from which to experience the opening of Boiler Room TV for the inauguration of New Alamein City, Egypt, July 2019 (Enter Surveillance Capitalism).

Essay

In Disguised as a DanceFloor
Edited by Joe Namy
Published by Renaisance Society

The Opening of Gateways (2016-2020)
2020

A text on fractures in time, and practices that keep sympathy with the stars.

Essay

In Arts of the Working Class:
Volume 10 - Old Cracks for New Mirrors
Edited by Stephanie Bailey

The Erotic Ruse
2020

On tuning into different frequencies of perception. And the pandemic’s effect on narrative, group choreography, and conception of proximity and distance.

Essay

In Chatrooms: On Curating Spaces
Edited by Engy Mohsen, Sarah Maher and Nour El Safoury
Published by

Ain Sokhna Love Song
2018-2019

A series of sculptures compose a scenography. From it hangs a flatscreen with two avatars singing a love song. In the background a second screen projection and overhead a lighting device gradually shift perception of depth, flattening the environment in the room. The scenography is inspired by a natural phenomena in Red Sea coastal town Ain Sokhna, close to where the new capital is being built, where microclimates affect perception of vision and sound to create weird physics as if harboring the coming of altered realities and digital nature.

Sculpture / Installation / Animation

Tree trunk, salt, glazed clay, unfired clay, floor drawings - arch paper, cinema screen, light boxes, automated lighting, flatscreen with internal speaker.

Artiste: I want you to
2019

A lovesong on death and resurrection, eros and apathy and long-duree practices to survive shifts in nature.

Sound/Audio + Live Performance

40 min
lyrics + vocals Malak Helmy
Instrumentation from Julius Eastman’s Fugue #7 by Janine Armin

Ghostwriter
2019

A doom track is made as a seance for Ancient Egyptian shabti stored at the British Museum to rise through the underworld to start an insurrection amongst the living. Made as a guerrilla audio guide on the occasion of the expansion of the British Museum’s collection of Ancient Egyptian artefacts into the modern.

Sound/Audio

40 min
Voice, arrangement, direction: Malak Helmy
Instrumentals, additional vocals by death metal artist Nader Sadek
Lyrics from a pasage in China Mieville’s Kraken
Commissioned by Cold Protein

The Ten Year Object
2015

On sustaining distances and the need for long-duree choreographies with friends.

Essay

in New Vocabulary
edited by Mai Abu El Dahab
funded by Mophradat

Both Sides of the Curtain: Meeting Points 8
2015-2017

An exhibition is conceptualized as the making of a group music album.
Inspired by growing improvisation, listening and writing practices and the pedagogical models of Oskar Schlemmer, performance programs and scenographies build on each other over two years.

Curated Exhibition

With Alaa Abdullatif, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Sophia Al Maria, Mirene Arsanios, Uriel Barthélémi, An Breugelmans, The Dwarfs of East Agouza (Alan Bishop, Maurice Louca and Sam Shalabi), Alix Eynaudi, Entissar Al Hamdany, Laura Huertas Millán, Candice Lin, Joe Namy, Elena Narbutaitė, Marnie Slater, and Nile Sunset Annex with Doa Aly, Shehab Awad, Chris Beauregard, Olivier Castel, Ericka Florez, and Marnie Slater.
curated by Malak Helmy and Raimundas Malasauskas
funded by Mophradat

Scene 4: For the Sunset

2013

A fourth scene for the three in Records from the Excited State.
A space cube becomes salt, a salt rock becomes a blue blob.

Public Sculpture

Salt cube (100x100x100cm), metal water tanks, fiberglass
A permanent installation on Nile Sunset Annex rooftop, Cairo

Records from the Excited State - Chapter 3: Lost Referents of Some Attraction

2012

Three scenes in landscape: a salt flat, a beach, and a future nuclear power plant.
Five characters walk on the edge of a narrative, anticipating employment into function and meaning. Like the landscape, they are extras on the periphery of an event

Film/Video

7 min
HD video, sound, colour

Statements from the Compound

2010/2014

A poem tells of a city where as a cure to worker’s nostalgia, they build its walls with photopaper sans fixer. In it no image can hold, nor record of past, future or law. In it they live in the permanence of the present, a permanent happy now.

Cast on unfixed photo paper the statement gives into the environment.

Installation

Foam-shaved sculptures (sizes variable), 20-part framed poem
cast on unfixed photo paper.

Marble Marble Gurgle Fountain Marble Marble

Music for Drifting
2013

Homing pigeons read magnetic fields to orient themselves during travel. This device in their consciousness is trained to return to a place in time it references as home. But where do bearings go when things no longer bear significance? Field recordings were made during a pilgrimage with a homing pigeon in August of 2013 in anticipation of a regime change to sites of ancient and modern events that have been erased from historical narratives.

This sound installation is composed of an arrangment of these tracks.

Sound Installation

40 min
4 to 6 channel audio (depending on location).

Liar Bird (Ecology without Nature Writing)

2015

This script was made for a voice actor who spends all his time online. It riffs off of a lyrebird who can mimic any other bird’s call, with a vocal range so wide as to include the accurate mimicry of cars and saws that describe its own nature’s destruction.

Originally commissioned as a studio visit for the Art Dubai’s The Island radio

Sound/Voice

8 min
MP3 on audio player, headphones, carpet, spotlight

Notes from the Carbon Coast

2010

Carbon and its allotropes, graphite and diamond, tell a story about value, real estate and the body between the Arab Gulf and Egypt.

Film/Video

3 min
SD Video, colour, sound

Keyword Searches for Dust

2009

In arabic, Habaa2 is the term used to describe the moment when individual particles of dust become visible to the naked eye. Habaa2’s translation into English renders these four words:
1. Dust; 2. Aerosol; 3. Chaos; 4. Vanity.

A narrative of dust in its mutable forms investigates, and it, itself, gets caught in a symptom. A form sheds its properties and becomes contagious: an avalanche razes a populated residential plateau; spontaneous combustions erupt in both The People’s Assembly Archive and a national theatre; in the countryside a home-bound train catches fire, all at once. Objects, normally bound within their own being-- whether a human body, concrete structure, digital image, exhibition, memory or word--are observing, and may perform the behavior of the other, possess its actions or qualities at will. Seemingly orchestrated yet attributable to none, it is as though the mere anarchy of witnessing, can cause an accidental collective event.

Film/Video

6 min
SD Video, colour, sound

Kiosk

2013

An abandoned multi-function structure in downtown Cairo is transformed into a wishing booth.

Public Sculpture

Repurposed multi-use structure in downtown Cairo,
velvet curtain, irridescent wall paper, a message that
says, “place your wish here and come tomorrow.”

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