Hanya Elghamry and Eleni Maragaki
SELF
drawings: Hanya Elghamry
The subjectivity that we believe as ours arises from our dependency on several paradoxes, that sustain our becoming and our existence. The attraction in this story is in the power that evokes a paradigm shift in the minds of its believers as they become a subject in the grand scheme of things, it comes from the knowledge that the human mind is a fraction of who we are, a fraction of reality.
Arguably most people may interpret information from a finite perspective, conditioned by personal, social, and historical circumstances, with no way of transcending to an all-inclusive objective viewpoint.
drawings: Hanya Elghamry text: Hanya Elghamry
Understanding that our belief system has been subjectively morphed by others, is an uncomfortable realization.
drawings: Hanya Elghamry text: Hanya Elghamry
drawings: Hanya Elghamry
STRUCTURE
The connecting thread between the city and the landscape is the obvious or underlying structure. These two units, although initially appear to be opposed to one another, both originate from the purity and simplicity of geometry. This fundamental connection is not always obvious to the human eye. Geometry is the hidden order, the underlying grid that establishes the way in which the elements of our world confront one another. It is not a human fabrication, but a human observation, a discovery of something so elemental, that the loss of it is equal to the loss of structure.
This fundamental language, offers an innate and intrinsic way to grasp the world around us; manifesting in a set of rules that derive from antiquity and have been expanded on throughout history becoming the scaffolding to both systemise the urban environment and provide a means of comprehending the natural one.
drawings: Hanya Elghamry text: Eleni Maragaki
drawings: Hanya Elghamry text: Eleni Maragaki
drawings: Hanya Elghamry text: Hanya Elghamry
The world itself is multilayered, which means that the basis of attempting to understand it needs to rest on different methods as well. By viewing the natural, human and artificial in all their complexity we challenge and expand our perceiving notions. At one time we might be mechanical or physical, real or fake, material or ideal. All these possibilities and contradicting ideas form a fragmental landscape, inviting us to observe intensely the world around us and view geometry, nature and humanity as interconnected and interdependent.
drawings: Hanya Elghamry text: Eleni Maragaki
“When failure is released from being a judgmental term, and success deemed overrated, the embrace of failure can become an act of bravery of daring to go beyond normal practices and enter the realm of not knowing,” said Lisa Le Feuvre in the “Strive To Fail” chapter of Failure (p.13). And when an artist refuses to accept incompetence as an obstruction, it often forces them into a repetitive layering strategy, where they use the same tactics in fear and hope that there has been a single error that led to failure. Failure here becomes a pivotal term, rejected by one group, embraced by the other (Le Feuvre, p.13). There is more interest in failure than in success, which could indicate fear of the truth and change, which when embraced could be pivotal. And once we are encouraged that failure is a valid result, the process becomes more about non-completion and experimentation and finding the pleasure in testing through failure. In this publication, the artworks draw more attention to the forgotten and the failure of tracking down the absent moments that are very evident in one’s personal and cultural history.
text: Hanya Elghamry
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