Hamdy Reda

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a visual artist, curator, and cultural activist, lives and works in Egypt and Germany. In addition to his BFA in Painting with honors from University of Helwan, Cairo (1997), Reda has taken part in numerous workshops and training programs in the fields of art history, curation, and cultural management throughout his career. His artistic career was complemented by the establishment of a residency space, Artellewa, in the Ard El Lewa district of Giza. Over ten years, Reda was the artistic director of the space, where he hosted over 100 local and international artists and encouraged dialogue between them and the community.

Website of Hamdy Reda >>

KAMEELTHIER

Installation, one of a series based on photography, amongst other visual media, by Hamdy Reda.
Following an artist’s talk in Freiberg, Hamdy Reda walked through the old city, where he found a drawing of a camel on a building facade from the 15th century (at the onset of colonialism). The day after an article appeared in DIE RHEINPFALZ dealing with how the awarding of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature to Abdulrazak Gurnah brought to mind German colonial history in East Africa. The debate about the restitution of colonial loot is in full swing.
Orientalism and Colonialism and what they have led to in our present time. A camel, a pyramid, pomegranates, pigeons in the sky, a child playing on the neighbor’s roof, a mother waiting outside, a teenager masturbating behind the wall, and a horizon view over an informal neighborhood. Fractals of expressions, thoughts, impressions apparently are not connected, and don’t lead to a solid concept, unless it’s in the backyard of Hamdy’s paradise.

Influenced by traditional academic studies and his own ongoing personal experiences, Reda creates works which are technically based on the photographic image as a medium and as a tool not as a goal in order to move the audience from the printed, occasionally colored, paper surface to the space of his dreams and reflections. Since the beginning of the 21st century, Hamdy Reda has been expanding his artistic performances beyond the frameworks that confine his artistic product to a specific concept, rather moving it to the space of his visual vision, which he has developed through his chaotic and random experiences with art and life.

After his experimental activity in the field of Alternative photography, he set out to develop his artistic and cultural tools to reinforce his relationship – as a practicing artist – with the surrounding urban and social milieu and his own interaction with it. Here are some highlights from Hamdy’s formulation of this vision, which he revealed beforehand, in some of its more complex aspects.
The rest is work on progress.