Malak Helmy (EG)
Residency period: January-March 2025
Based in Cairo, Malak Helmy is an Egyptian artist and writer working with text, image and sculptural forms. Her projects explore changing relationships between place, nature, technology and perception. Malak Helmy’s audio-visual work has been showcased at various venues internationally, including Bozar Center for Fine Arts, Brussels and Nottingham Contemporary, and her writing has been published widely.
During her residency at La Becque, Malak will be working on a triptych of visual essays and drawings that trace shifts in visual aesthetics in the last decade, and their relationship to neoliberalization and data capitalism. These essays and drawings make reference to social media, recent art exhibitions and mass media transmissions and their effect on collective perception. This new work builds on her recent curatorial/editorial project Software Upgrade, that offers a speculative proposal that Egypt fell out of a shared global temporality between 2014 and 2019, as the foundation for a study of images and artistic production after that time.