Mohamed A. Gawad / Porfolio
betalpha (Balbalah) - بَلبَلة
2018, 5’’31’, single channel video
Bal-balah, noun. 1- Befuddlement; Clutter; Discomposure. 2- A language deconstruction exercise, where sentences of different linguistic origins morph through different mother tongues/ ears. 3- A hypothetical situation of a post-historic moment of loss of language: “At a time before time, a Big Bang in Babel sat the uni-logos into a perpetual process of language breeding. At one point, that expansion expires. What follows is a recoil; where dialect-ic-s coalesce, and separates overlap"
password: translate
Artists' Film International, 2020 - Whitechapel Gallery
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin - 2020
65. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen - Germany (International competition)
31st Instants Vidéo Numériques et poétiques - Marseille, France
Videobardo, Festival Internacional De Videopoesía, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2018
A Missing Storey
2022, 9’’06’, single channel video
Every time, we animals come back to a new place (and even if we come back to the same one, it is already renewed by our return.)
password: homeland
67. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen - Germany (International Competition, 2022)
re : Di d u see t hat?!
2015, 1’’00’, Video
Part of the one minutes series, ‘But her eyes said that gunshot knew he had a creation, and that was why parrot was wise of bulk’ inspired by the wondrous world of spam poetry, automated emails from the chicks with dicks on how we make that extra mega buck from home, ditzy television shows and videos from the local home depot store, brainy quotes and hairy proverbs in our daily mail – in short, all the stuffy decor that clutters our brains and follows us everywhere because it’s deep and sublime, and we know it.
Footnotes on Migration – هوامش عن الهجرة
2016, 10’’, Loop, 2-Channel Video Installation
In 2008, a group of researchers, writers, and filmmakers worked on producing a documentary that attempted to describe experiences of migration by sea from the north coast of Egypt to Europe. Eight years later, now in the face of exasperatingly high and desperate global migratory movements, two members of Take to the Sea, the collective behind the documentary, revisit the video footage produced in the process, looking back at some of the frail moments left ashore in formal narratives of migration and documentary filmmaking. HAWAMESH AAN AL-HEGRA is an attempt to look into the space between the filmmakers and their subjects, at times collapsing it and at others disrupting it.
Set between a projection of a scrutinized sun – pixilated and zoomed in from the video footage – and an assemblage of video fragments, HAWAMESH AAN AL-HEGRA sneaks out of its traditional origins as a documentary and zooms into the materiality of images that endure on pixels and in memory.
HAWAMESH AAN AL-HEGRA was realized by two members of Take to the Sea collective; Lina Attalah and Mohamed A. Gawad.
passwords: ttts
21 Sunsets, HKW, Berlin, 2021
The Stars Down to Earth. Group Exhibition, Forum Expanded, Berlin, 2017
Evasive Routes. Group Exhibition, CiC, Cairo, 2016
Time Helix
2016, site specific installation, (Thread, Film Reels, Text) - Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art archives.
The installation came at the conclusion of a three-months residency at Arsenal’s archives, on the one hand connecting and tracing a process of discovery and loss, and on the other, raising questions about accessibility and openness of archives, and the institutions built around them.
Text DE/EN: Link
ESS/The Quarantine Concerts - Maurice Louca
2020, 32’’53’, Music Video
Palmyra (بالميرا) – Nadah El Shazly
2018, 8’’47’, Music Video
Hindsight, Foresight
2017, Found Letter (n.d.), Light Box, Cairo
Commission for The New Normal Project, an exhibition and a book curated Hiba Farahat and Murat Adash .
“As seemingly distant and unlike things are remarkably linked into one another, the new rapidly evolves resembling the familiar as the familiar seems more and more ambiguous. What is most normal is also most strange and horrific. Although these propositions may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they might as well be mutually constitutive.”
Celluloid Corridors
Cassette Tape, Digital Album, 2017
An audio-play about cinema: part film-manifesto, part audio-essay, part cinematic-séance, channeled via the voice and words of Cairo based artist Mohamed A. Gawad and Berlin/Salford-based, FITH co-founder, filmmaker, writer Dalia Neis aka dice miller, with music, arrangement, and celluloid-splicing from berlin-based kreidler-chief, Andreas Reihse. voices summoned from the lucid realms of the technologically-spirited, more-than-human archive: "...backed with abstraction of classical instrumentation, with stabs of strings warped into a thousand fragments, brutally interspersed with piercing shrieks before bringing things back to earth with perfectly measured throbbing organic whirrs. focusing on images, but (...) bringing things almost chronologically forward, with the history of film being investigated".