‘Cairo. Open city. New testimonies from an ongoing revolution’ is an experimental, continually regenerative exhibition project. It looks to the political and social awakening of a generation that came to light with the onset of mass demonstrations on January 25, 2011 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

This story is predominantly told by Egyptian artists and photographers, activists and curators. Another focus is the link to the role of images and new digital networks, which in part served to initiate the uprising, documented events and broadcast them to the entire world.

The exhibition explores a wide range of practices within the time-based media of photography and video, based on photographs taken by photojournalists, recordings made by activists and « civilian journalists » and documents compiled by artists. Photography and its diverse functions also come under the spotlight as a medium that is currently undergoing an important transformation: making opinions heard, influencing the course of events, creating images as recollections, commemorating victims and bearing testimony to events. The exhibition has been divided up into chapters and stations, curated by a team of renowned personalities from Cairo’s art scene, including artists Lara Baladi and Heba Farid, photographers Thomas Hartwell and Tarek Hefny, artist Jasmina Metwaly, filmmaker Philip Rizk and journalists Rowan El Shimi and Alex Nunns.  The show is a collaborative project together with the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig. Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. The exhibition was realized in collaboration with the Goethe Institute.

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