Mohamed Abdelkarim

Associate artist Mohammed Abdelkarim presents a month of events in Cairo to per formatively revisit the release of his new book "Let the Sea Eat Me: To Perform a Ferry". The book comprises eight performance scripts and other material to be spoken and it focuses on Abdelkarim’s ongoing research into the figures of renegades and the state of migrating.
Each chapter pivots around a cluster of verbs and nouns that form part of Abdelkarim’s practice: body, narrating; history, serendipity, swimming; renegades, pulling, othering; fiction, becoming, floating. While working on this book, he began to question the dominance of "the authoring I.” Through a delegation process, other performers were invited to intervene onto the original scripts and add layers to what the relation between text, sound, language, body and landscape could yield. As a result, scripts that once served as aids during performances, or tools of documentation became material to be co-opted, reused and reinterpreted from multiple narrative positions and histories.
Along the month of March 2021 in Cairo, Abdelkarim organizes a program of performances, reading, conversations to unfold the potentiality of speaking up the book though artistic practice that uses body, language, image, sound and other things. Through this month-long engagement with the book the artist invite the audience to join him as he think in embodied ways and feelings what it means to become someone who leaves land behind roving the desert or inhabiting the sea.
The events will be partially documented on The Institute social media.

BIO
Mohamed Abdelkarim lives and works in Egypt. After he had written his Master’s thesis of knowledge engagement at ECAV, Switzerland 2014, Abdelkarim turned toward producing text-based performances, and become committed to performative practices across multidisciplinary research, concerning the perception of narrating, singing, dancing, detecting and doing.
His practice engages with these actions through the focus on travel, locomotion, renegades history and picaresque literature, where a series of non-linear, serendipitous encounters with concepts, fictions, almost truth and what is known as historical facts, are gathered to form a script and an archive of events and stories. In this context, his practice aims at producing narratives and expose the way narratives are produced.
As part of his performative practices, Abdelkarim established a project "Tadbikat" as a performative project that brings together (and synthesises across) lectures, debates, group readings, critical responses, and creative quests, alongside with organising performance nights under the title of "Live Praxes." Also Abdelkarim co-designing/leading “Roznama studio program” a six months pedagogical program founded by Medrar for contemporary art, Cairo.