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The Nile Is More than a River

From October 05, 2023 until January 28, 2024Mondays through Sundays, from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.

MADRID

Casa Árabe Hall of Columns (at Calle Alcalá, 62, basement level). Mondays through Sundays, from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached.

In Spanish.

Starting on October 5 at its Madrid headquarters, Casa Árabe will be hosting this exhibition by artist María Primo, resulting from an artist-in-residency program that allowed her to take a closer look at life along the Nile and the threats against the river’s ecosystem.

The exhibition’s curator, Blanca de la Torre, has provided the following presentation: “After completing research in Luxor, Egypt, María Primo approached the Nile to hear some of the tales it has to tell: mythological stories, women pharaohs, tomb raiders, age-old structures and vernacular architecture. While listening, she also encountered major threats, including the deterioration caused to heritage sites by the impact of the climate crisis and mass tourism.

Through a multidisciplinary body of work that includes photos, ceramics, drawings and video, sometimes created using found and archival materials, her practice offers new narratives that can be used to discuss water and the ways in which Arab women are made invisible within the social arena, thus displacing the mainstream anthropocentric gaze while highlighting the importance of recovering traditional epistemologies.

The exhibition’s title is an allusion to the Nile as a structure-building backbone, in reference to Egypt’s Hassan Fathy, a pioneer of sustainable architecture, who pointed out that ‘a door is not just a door’ but also a threshold between the outer and inner worlds.”

The exhibition has been organized into interconnected conceptual sections through which the artist skilfully navigates the waters of these different temporalities, taking us from remote centuries to the present by making use of a sophisticated fusion between fiction and reality, legends and episodes in history. This also serves the purpose of building a story that raises discussion over our relationship with nature and the complex interconnected bonds underlying today’s ecological crisis.