The Diversity of All and Everything Possible

XII Cairo International Art Biennale, 2011

Cairo Art Biennale

December 12, 2010 - February 12, 2011

Curator: Ihab El Labban

 

Cairo’s Biennial exhibition of art is the oldest International show in Northern Africa. Farouk Hosny – Minister for the Cultural Heritage of the Arab Republic of Egypt – will open the twelfth edition of the Biennial Exhibition of Art on 12th of December 2010 at the Cairo’s Palais d’Art. Works of nearly hundred artists are displayed. They come from forty countries all over the world: Algeria, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Korea, Italy, U.S.A., Venezuela, Philippines.

Our time: is it a landmark in history that summarizes all and every surprise, all and every curiosity we have come to know? Are we at a time that is like an unstoppable train that pierces every direction at the same time? Has art become one of those directions that is eternally open-ended –by default as it tackles the visual– surmounting and undermining all verbal expression, defying all and every description? Are we at a position today to expect more questions than the classical: Why, Who, How, When and Where?eved in any one century. We lived the moment to see that what we have come to know as established and rooted values, like identity, gender, physicality, history and perhaps reality itself, with all their established criteria and indicators, are all liable to a process of scientific revision, change –and many times abolishment without return.
Perhaps the best achievement of all is the change of the nature in questions; we became quasi tolerant in accepting partial answers, and even more tolerant in settling with several truths, and an infinite diversity of beliefs. We became more experimental, more audacious to tread on newer grounds, open new paths and walk without having a particular destination in mind, and more often than not hitting along the way more closed doors ready for our struggle to open, without any expectations except to learn a newer process.
"Art ad what it is" becomes the sum of all questions: did it change its nature? Where are the tangential and/or the pivotal points between fiction and reality, between the virtual and the physical real? Do we need art today at a time and space full of conflicts and struggle to survive? What makes a work of art today "contemporary" in the sense of how it talks to us today in this time-space continuum? How do digital and virtual technologies talk to us? All those questions are no more "a bunch of intellectual" questions" that concern a small circle of art world professionals; there is no more center and no more periphery, as proved by the numerous thematic international art events in the past decade. Those questions are common concerns that challenge an intricate world, open to a diversity of possibilities at all times.
As we end the first decade of a third millennium, the XII Biennale proposes and solicits to partner with artists to develop more questions in total conceptual and technical liberty and freedom. We plan for the Cairo Biennale with its 2010 invited artists to work to shed more light on more process questions that would, perhaps, participate in extending limits of the current contemporary visual language and its diversity: the diversity of all and everything possible.

Ehab El Labban, December 2010