The 29th Letter of the Alphabet
Tamara Building
Downtown Cairo, Egypt
October 19 – November 7, 2019
A commercial exhibition and the collateral event of:
Re-imagined Narratives: From Spatial Memory to Mapping the Future, itself a group show featuring newly commissioned, site-specific works by Egyptian artists, exhibited in UNESCO-protected structures on Mu’izz Street in Islamic Cairo, initiated and curated by Nadine Ghaffar, the founding director of Art d’Egypte
Parallel to Art d’Egypt’s main 2019 exhibition Reimagined Narratives that is housed in four historical venues on Mu’iz Street in Islamic Cairo is the commercial exhibition The 29th Letter of the Alphabet, the main collateral event featuring 5 Egyptian galleries with artworks by 43 modern and contemporary Egyptian artists, on view at the historic Tamara Building in Downtown Cairo.
The 29th Letter’s program also includes talks and workshops by speakers Dr. Venetia Porter, Curator of Islamic and Contemporary Middle East art at the British Museum; Dr. Yannick Lintz, Director of the Islamic Art department of the Louvre Paris, Prof. Dominique Lämmli of the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, and Dr. Thomas Girst, Global Head of Cultural Engagement of the BMW Group.
There are 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet. The titular 29th letter in this exhibition refers to the unique languages that artists create. While all forms of communication build on shared elements, artists branch out from these well-defined signifiers to make something distinct from all else. These forms of artistic expression exist in-addition-to our commonly used languages. Yet, curiously, anyone who engages with an artwork will understand something within the artist’s very own language, even if the work is entirely unrelated to anything the audience has experienced before.
This group exhibition at the historic Tamara Building in Downtown Cairo focuses on multiple works per exhibiting artist, pieces that span a wide breadth of their individual productions and ones that are also essential to the artists’ respective oeuvres. Taken as separate projects, each artist presents a poignant overview of their respective work, but seen as a group exhibition, The 29th Letter showcases a glorious plurality and richness of artistic languages. You are cordially invited to engage with this 29th Letter that makes Egypt’s contemporary art sector what it is today.
Exhibiting galleries and artists
Gallery Misr
Essam Marouf, Marwa Adel, Medhat Shafik, Moataz Nasr, Mohamed Abla, Naguib Moein, Nazir Tanbouli, Said Badr
Karim Francis
Adam Henein, Ahmed Nosseir, Hassan Kamel, Maged Mekhail, Marcus Harris, Mohamed Radwan, Sobhy Guirguis
Picasso Gallery
Alyaa Kamel, Amina Salem, Britt Boutros Ghali, Farouk Hosny, Mustafa El Razaz, Nihal Wahby, Omar El-Nagdy, Samir Fouad
Mashrabia Gallery
Adel El Siwi, Ahmed Sabry, Hany Rashed, Hazem El Mestekawy, Mohamed Abdallah, Qarm Qart, Salah El Mur, Soad Abdel Rasoul
and introducing Aton Gallery
and its one-off collaborations with the independent artists: Effat Nagy, Esraa El Feky, Fathi Hassan, Hamed Abdalla, Hana Elbeblawy, Imane Ibrahim, Malak Shenouda, Mohamed El Ganoubi, Mohamed Nagy, Omar Senada, Therese Antoine, Walid Elsawi
Production
Misfits LLC
Graphic Design
Yasmin Ibrahim
Alexandra Stock 
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