31 Jan 2010 to 17 Feb 2010
Saturday-Wednesday
9am-2pm, 6-9pm
The Townhouse Gallery
10 Nabrawy street
off Champollion street
Cairo
Downtown Cairo
Egypt
Middle East
p: +2 02 2576 8086
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f:
w: www.thetownhousegallery.com
Doa Aly, The Girl Splendid in Walking, video still.
31 January – 17 February 2010 Opening: Sunday, 31 January 2010, 7 PM Townhouse 1st Floor
The Girl Splendid in Walking is an exhibition premiering Doa Aly’s most recent work in Egypt.
The two-channel video, The girl splendid in walking takes as its premise the story of Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy, by Wilhelm Jensen. In the original novel, an archeologist falls in love with the bas-relief of a girl in the act of walking. He names her Gradiva; «the girl splendid in walking».
Through her loose interpretation and tightly choreographed narrative, Aly designs a set of movements fusing pantomime and circus tightrope performance. The two-screen video-poesy evolves around the characters' infatuation with an unusual manner of walking. The artist carefully constructs cyclic sequences around the seemingly awkward walk; how it is ingrained, mimicked, perceived and idolized as the video progresses. The choreography in the end articulates the body's ability to culminate into highly productive and aestheticized instances through the strict repetition of one task.
Also on show, is Doa Aly's most recent video Sequence One - In Four Movements in which the artist stages her interpretation of the story of Narcissus and Echo from Ovid's Metamorphosis. In the original story, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection, whilst Echo is consumed by her love for Narcissus, resigned to a fate of solely existing as a voice in repetition of Narcissus' last words. Aly approaches narrative through metronomic movement, encapsulating the recursion of Narcissus' encounter both with himself and Echo: she deconstructs the relationship between subject and object.
The first work to be choreographed in its entirety by the artist, Sequence One - In Four Movements, references earlier work by the artist such as 48 Ballet Classes (2005) and A Tress of Hair (2008), which are inspired by classical ballet and literary fiction respectively.
The exhibition will also feature Drawings #55-59, based on the work Sequence One - In Four Movements, from the Drawings series which combines elements of the human figure with studies of anatomy.
Doa Aly (1976) obtained her BA in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo in 2001. Doa Aly has participated in international group exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 2008; the Tate Modern, the Contemporary Art Forum, London, the Arnolfini Musem, Bristol and the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève in 2007 . Her work was featured at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2006 and was part of the 7th Dakar Biennial the same year. The Girl Splendid in Walking was premiered in 2009 at the 11th Istanbul Biennial in 2009 and is currently on show as part of her solo exhibitions of the same name at Darat Al-Funun in Amman and the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo.
