Mona Marzouk

Mona Marzouk’s interest in architectural histories is visible in many of her works – in painting, sculpture as well as site-specific murals and paintings. Blurring the boundary between past and present day, man-made and natural, biomorphic and geometrical, personal and political, beautiful and ugly, and masculine and feminine, Marzouk redefines how we see the world. With the sensibility of a maverick architect, Marzouk envisions aesthetic systems that draw on a diversity of cultural traditions but which can only exist in the realm of the imagination. Her early paintings and sculptures reassemble disparate architectural elements from history as well as animal and body parts to construct unified compositions. Castles and cathedrals, crenellations and crustaceans merge together in fluid form. Her compositions, which often float in the center of a frame, reference post-minimalism, with their hard edges and flat expanses of solid color.

Curator

Alexandra Stock

Alexandra Stock is a Swiss/American curator, artist & consultant with over a decade of experience in curatorial practice and arts management in the Middle East. She is the Creative Director of ARCHiNOS, Egypt’s leading architecture, design and conservation firm that operates at the intersections of tangible & intangible cultural heritage and contemporary art & design. She previously held curatorial and/or managerial positions at the Townhouse Gallery and Beirut, both in Cairo, and Al Riwaq Art Space in Bahrain. Stock graduated from the Zurich University of the Arts with a BFA in Art Theory, completed De Appel’s Curatorial Program in Amsterdam and studied Arabic at the DEAC in Cairo. She is a participant of the yearlong Townhouse Curatorial Program and the Townhouse ISP in Cairo, the first initiatives of their kind both offered in and focused on the history & historiography of art in the greater Middle East. For three seasons, Stock represented the MENA region on the International Council advisory board of PBS’s Peabody and Emmy award-winning broadcast program ‘Art in the Twenty-First Century’ and later consulted for the Bahrain Authority for Culture & Antiquities. In addition to her work with ARCHiNOS, Stock is devoting time to graduate studies in Global Diplomacy (with a focus on Cultural Diplomacy) at SOAS and Cultural Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Artists