Impressions of Cairo Tatort, solo-exhibition curated by Jamila Adeli Gallery Christian Hosp, Berlin September 25 – November 20, 2010 Impressions of Cairo is a paper work made of fifteen prints of walls in Cairo. In Winter 2010 I visited Cairo, a city which has more citizens than Tunisia, the country where I was born. This metropolis is characterized by strong contradictions: tradition and modernism, culture and illiteracy, poverty and wealth, bureaucracy and spirituality. All voices fade through the noisy hustle of this melting pot, but if you risk a closer look on the walls you will find the whisper of the people carved into stone.
I started to search for writings engraved in the walls of the Egyptian capital. As tools I used a hammer and papers.
Nadia Kaabi-Linke is a Tunisian artist, born in Tunis in 1978 from a Russian mother from Kiev and a Tunisian father. She experienced life in many countries, languages, and cultures, such as Ukraine (Kiev), Tunisia (Tunis and Bizerte), the United Arab Emirates (Dubai), and France (Paris). She studied in the Academy of Fine Arts in Tunis, and later in Paris where she combined her artistic work with studies in philosophy and science. Today, she lives and works in Tunis and Berlin. She accomplished her scientific research in artistic poeïtics, which focused the subject “The Invisible and the Pictorial Emergence of the Surface in Installation-Paintings” with the degree of a PhD (summa cum laude) at the Sorbonne University of Paris in 2008. This concept remained central to here practical art work. praxis communicates the notions of contemporary history in the context of an “archeology of the visual contemporaneity” and site-specificity.