The Balcony Series. 2002 - ongoing.

The growing collection of balcony paintings has been the base for photographic installations, postcards and paper sculptures, videos & animations, among them is Colors of the Grey, Balcony Series in Green, Telekinesis, Tableaux Vivants and others.

This ongoing project has started in June 2003 in Cairo, in the areas inhabited by the mass population. The building of highways and road-rings, which cut through the masses of ghetto areas of Cairo have exposed the zigzagged lines of bare brick and gray cement, creating stretches of colorless panoramas forming a Cairo Skyline that is neutral, as glimpsed through passing cars.

The project is an attempt to highlight statements of individuality; Balconies, which stand out, whose owners have exhibited part of themselves on it. Although, often overlooked and absorbed in midst of all the surrounding grayness, when seen on their own, the colors, patterns, symbols and writings on each balcony walls express a unique call for recognition

The aim of the project is to verge these voices and celebrate their connotations, by recomposing the area, so that illusory blocks and neighborhoods are created, ones that demonstrate against detachment and flatness, and publicly exhibit its thoughts, dreams, affiliations, ideas and lifestyles. One of these recompositions, ‘Colors of the Gray’, has won the Bronze Award of the 'Canon Digital Creators Contest' in Dec. 2003.

Telekinesis (2007) displays an illusory re-composed block, which does not adhere to constructional and architectural standards, nor does it follow the laws of nature and physics or the habits of trained mental and visual perception. The merge is rather an act of joining sequences and patterns of origin, history, culture and aesthetics, aspired illusions or dreams intrinsic to its individual creators.

Telekinesis is part of an ongoing project, where painted balconies in the urban informal neighbourhoods of Cairo are photographically documented; then the images are reassembled to create imaginative collages of residential blocks. During that process, the painted parts are freed from the air-thick cast of exhaust, which extends the gray of bare concrete and passes anonymousity and sameness to the colorless surroundings. The formerly obscured, faint and detached colors, shapes and symbols often created by the inhabitants themselves, join, for recognition, and for celebrating an existence, that is more alive, yet to prove a diversity, for each, a statement of individuality and of identity, a self-representation, on exhibit.

Link on Vimeo to see Telekinesis.

Latest exhibition of Tableaux Vivants Sculpture has been in Zentral Institut für Kunstgeschichte (ZIK) in Munich as part of Photobook Africa. 2020. Photobook Africa is a conference, exhibition and book, based on a collaboration between ZIK & LMU, Munich. 2020. Please find the full credits and info about the project on this link.

Please see this version of the sculpture and other versions exhibited in Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin 2008 & Kunstraum Düsseldorf, 2009 below.

PDF documents with texts about Tableaux Vivants Sculpture, by Susanna Baumgartner (in German only).