Reading Le Corbusier in Arabic and Other Fragments of Modernity at Ashkal Alwan

As part of the Home Works 6 Platform, Ashkal Alwan is hosting a lecture by Mohamed Elshahed called “Reading Le Corbusier in Arabic and Other Fragments of Modernity”.

After returning to Cairo in 2010 to conduct fieldwork for his doctoral research on 20th century architecture in Egypt, Elshahed built a collection of publications, periodicals, documents, photographs and other ephemera. The initial intent was to utilize architecture as a lens through which to address Egypt’s political and cultural conditions in a period roughly framed by WWII and the Six-Day War.

However, the small collection of objects, which came together as each item promised to deliver a piece of the puzzle, and the excavation through this collection in an attempt to construct a narrative, has opened up questions about in-between histories, incompleteness, the historical canon and the authority of documents and historians, among other things. This talk will use this collection of printed matter in an attempt to recontextualize and question the dividing lines between the personal and the collective, the monumental and the ephemeral, history and memory, the official and the marginalized.