Mushrooming
Exhibition by Yvonne Buchheim and Sarah Samy
Curated by Kasha Bittner German Embassy Cairo and Goethe Institut, Downtown Cairo 2015 Mushrooming in Cairo and Berlin is an art project that evolved from a state of not-knowing. Both artists changed their place of residence: Egyptian artist Sarah Samy had moved to Berlin, and German artist Yvonne Buchheim had relocated to Cairo. Finding ourselves in places and cultures unknown, we have had to explore them. For this process we decided to have some local guides, and mushrooms seemed the perfect candidates. |
Yvonne began the project by taking mock mushrooms to the streets of Cairo to provoke interactions. Her video Perfectly Voiceless brings together natural and artificial mushrooms in morphing, hallucinogenic moving images. The stop motion animation unravels the secret lives of Cairo's mushrooms and leaves the viewer with John Cage's conviction that it is useless to pretend to know mushrooms. After watching the video we understand, that what we get to see, is just a small fragment of an overwhelming unseen structure and richness. Kasha Bittner |