SOFTWARE UPGRADE: GYPSUM GALLERY
A GROUP SHOW WITH ZEINA ALY, CASTELL LANKO, nasa4nasa, OMAR EL SADEK, HEND SAMIR, AND YAZAN EL ZUBI
CURATED BY MALAK HELMY
Yazan El Zubi, Object of Civilization Series (2011–2022), Courtesy of Gypsum Gallery, Installation view by Mostafa Abdel-Aty
Software Upgrade proposes that the nature of the image shifted over the last decade in Egypt — more specifically, between 2014 and 2019. Conditions made it such that a reformatting of our collective relationship to images took place; that period saw a lapse in the semiotic order, and within that lapse the image shifted. The artworks presented evidence a search for what an image is: how to perceive it, observe it, find it, and transcribe it onto and through various surfaces.
The exhibition takes its title from a text by Malak Helmy looking at the conditions in which that semiotic lapse occurred. In the text, which is included in the publication accompanying the show, the period is bracketed between two moments of global transmission: one being the last image of uprising in 2013 — marking the cutting off of visual and literary transmission of images to the world from Egypt — and the other being the Golden Pharaoh Mummy Parade, the return to a new order of image transmission. The time between is articulated as an unordered temporality. The text explores how the lapse affected a collective body’s relationship to self and image. It suggests that cultural production moved from the visual and literary towards the sonic, and that through sound — perhaps a mode less tied to the production of meaning or legibility — one could listen for an image again. Title adapted from composer Pauline Oliveros’ Software for People (1984), in which she writes about deep listening and group composition.
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