Upcoming and Current projects

Egypt Art Deco

As the world celebrates 100 years of the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, the landmark event that gave the Art Deco style its name and cemented its status on the international stage, curator and theorist Adham Hafez has initiated the ‘Egypt Art Deco’ project. The project consists of a series of talks and symposium, a new publication, commissioned work, and a series of global exhibitions that mark Egypt’s impact on the global Art Deco movement. An overlooked chapter in the history of ‘les Arts Decoratifs’, Ancient Egypt’s influence and early 20th century Egyptian modernism will be celebrated and documented in ‘Egypt Art Deco’ project.

ARQAAM x 5

Curated five years ago to survey digital and video art in the Arab region, ARQAAM was the region’s first large-scale exhibition dedicated to the history of digital art and newmedia from Arab contemporary artists, curated by Adham Hafez. This year, we look back at the project five years later, through a new exhibition, a series of publications, and an interview series with pioneering digital arts specialists across the Arab speaking region. Curated by Adham Hafez, and developed in partnership with Wizara, HaRaKa Platform, and partners.

TAWAREEKH

When curator, theorist and artist Adham Hafez started his research project on contemporary art history in the Arab world back in 2008, he did not know he would be collecting and recording interviews from a world that is about to change forever. Jump to 2025, and after multiple artistic and epistemic ruptures, and with an accumulated nearly two decades of publications, global conferences, and curricula created by Adham Hafez, and designed after a deep research on the history of contemporary Arab Art, Hafez is launching ‘TAWAREEKH’, a new research project and publication series that documents Arab Art History from 2000 to 2025, marking the region’s first exhaustive research on the subject, with field research, SME’s, and consultants from cities including Cairo, Beirut, Riyadh, Jeddah, Damascus, Casablanca, among others. Launched in Spring 2025 at New York Arab Festival this year, with a focus on performance histories, the series will be launching its next edition in Winter 2025, through a publication series, an online archive, and in-person lectures, documenting Cairo’s changing art scene and resilience, against all odds.

Previous and ongoing projects

PRICKS

PRICKS stands for Pandemics, Representation, Intimacy, Congregation and Knowledge Systems. An international recurrent conference series, curated by Adham Hafez, and is a partnership between HaRaKa Plaform, New York University’s department of Performance Studies, and Cairography Publication. The series invited guests including Syrian choreographer Mey Seifan, Belgian theorist Joachim Ben Yakoub, Moroccan Philosopher Arafat Sadallah, among others. Discussions revolve around urgent questions within an accelerationist reality, with the desire to carve out spaces for such urgent conversations within academic and curatorial institutions.

Of Songs and Fish

Adham Hafez was invited by Utrecht University’s “History of Knowledge” conference, to present a paper that investigates the connection between loss of biodiversity in the Red Sea, in relation to disappearance of popular dances and songs from that region. The paper entitled ‘Of Songs and Fish’, results from the multi-year research project ‘In 50 Years Or So’, directed by Adham Hafez, in partnership with HaRaKa Platform’s core members, Mona Gamil, Lamia Gouda, and Adam Kucharski. Currently, the research looks at ways of rethinking tools in art historiography, through addressing the Anthropocene.

Ouroboros

In ancient Egypt and Greece, the symbol of the serpent eating its own tail played an important role in magic, Gnosticism, and Alchemy. 4000 years later, the “Ouroboros” also became a founding notion in Cybernetics, making it all the way in blockchain infrastructures today. Created through conversations with the AI-powered responsive technology ChatGPT, Ourboros is part ritual, part lecture, investigating symbols of eternity within our digital futures. This multimedia performance is a production of HaRaKa Platform, Hebbel Am Ufer Theater, Powered by Wizara.