World of Art,
School for Contemporary Arts

Presentation and discussion with Barbara Borčić

February 2, 2010
Library, Townhouse Gallery, Downtown, Cairo, Egypt

The Townhouse Gallery is an important gallery of contemporary art in Cairo. They are widely active in the field of contemporary arts in Egypt by organising exhibitions, various events, lectures and workshops. Apart from that, they run artist-in-residency and educational program and also offer studios to the artists for short periods time. The Townhouse Gallery is located in the downtown area opposite to the former villa of Jean-François Champollion, who first managed to decode hieroglyphs. The gallery uses two buildings in the mid of a neighbourhood occupied by mainly garages and teahouses. In the library, which is similar to the Project Room at SCCA they organize events, lectures and also an educational program Townhouse Independent Study Program (ISP).

It was a pleasant surprise to have so many people attaining the presentation of World of Art, School for Contemporary Arts. Among them, there where also participants of the Open Studio Workshop as well as of the educational program run by Laura Carderera at the Townhouse Gallery. I was also happy to have the opportunity to meet Angela Harutyunyan, the co-organizer of Summer Seminars' Program for Contemporary Art Curators in Yerevan, Armenia, who was also present at the presentation. Currently she is a Visiting Professor of Art History and Art Program Director at the American University in Cairo. She collaborates with SCCA’s World of Art program on regular basis and she had a lecture at SCCA just a few days prior to my lecture.

I structured my presentation in three parts. Initially introducing the specific milieu of Slovenia from which I come, and the situation regarding the contemporary art education there. Then with the friendly help of Power Point I presented the Wold of Art from its beginnings in 1997 to a complex school for contemporary art in recent years, emphasising the dilemmas and issues that we are facing today. By projecting the photos from the Wold of Art exhibitions held in various galleries and I also tried to introduce to the public a part of art production in Slovenia. For the conclusion, we viewed a Video Essay that was produced at the World of Art Workshop by Nika Grabnar. Her extraordinary 16 minutes long video explores audiovisual archives through the DIVA Station exhibition at the Škuc Gallery in 2009. Through the Video Essay the viewers could get acquainted with one of the segments of the educational processes of the World of Art School and at the same time learn about the topic of contemporary audiovisual archives which has been one of the primary concerns of SCCA for many years. All SCCA’s projects connected to the archives have been finally incorporated into the DIVA Station. The video works will soon be available on the internet, accessible also to the curious people from distant countries such as Egypt.

The viewers were satisfied with the projection and enthusiastic about the Video Essay. In the presentation I have tried to draw some distance to the ‘universal’ understanding of contemporary art and curatorial profession. Considering the fact that both programs, the Townhouse seminar and the SCCA's World of Art, are the only educational programs for curators in the respective countries, we engaged into a long discussion with colleagues and the audience. They were interested in our plans for the future and liked the idea of introducing a series of smaller projects as a complementary process-related practice finalised by a comprehensive exhibition at the end of this process. There are many possibilities for exchange of knowledge in the field of education and archives in the future and we are greatly looking forward to further cooperation.

Barbara Borčić

LINKS

• Announcement

PARTNERS

Townhouse Gallery (Cairo, Egypt), SCCA-Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Arts (Ljubljana, Slovenia).

The programme was partly financed by the Department of Culture of the City of Ljubljana and partly by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.
The residency was supported by the Townhouse Gallery and HaRaKa in Cairo, Egypt.