Category: Art

Art by DoppelHouse Press
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Hunting for Art on the Ring Road

BY AHMED NAJI -أحمد ناجى
The shop walls were covered with wooden planks, on those planks, drawings of people in a state of motion. They were crossing the street or leaving a building, but here they were stuck in a void.

That was the first exhibition by “Amr El Kafrawy” for me to attend. We met for a short interview. He told me about his work approach: sitting in some “internet café” overlooking Talaat Harb square in the Downtown area, getting out a small camera while watching people, and secretly taking photographs of them. Afterward, he drew on those photographs to put them back in a state of motion. He turned them into black shadows crossing the empty wooden planks covering the “Artellewa” gallery walls.

Art by DoppelHouse Press
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COVID-19, MY COMRADE: Central-European Graffiti and Street-Art Responses to Pandemic

Written and photographed by Mitja Velikonja, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

In the beginning is the scream. … And lots of screaming can be heard lately, in difficult times of global COVID-19 pandemic. As a researcher of urban cultures and radical politics I’m particularly interested in “sprayed screams,” … reacting to the disease and even more to governmental medical, social and economic measures against it.

Art by DoppelHouse Press
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Pandemic BLM Politics: Graffiti from New York, Long Beach, and Los Angeles

By Carrie Paterson
Photos by Seph Rodney, Mario Ybarra Jr., and Carrie Paterson

It was lucky for me that early in the (first?) summer of the pandemic, I encountered the writings of Slovenian “graffitologist” Mitja Velikonja, just as my home street corner started filling up with warring pandemic wheatpaste posters and stickers. Like many shops and businesses around the country, the tenants decided to board up the windows in a (hyperbolic, on my quiet street) show of fear about property damage that might ensue from the Black Lives Matter protests

Art by DoppelHouse Press
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LOUISE BRIGHAM: Adventures of a Scrap Artist

By Antoinette LaFarge

“Two summers on the island of Spitzbergen,” wrote Louise Brigham in 1909, “taught me, more than all previous experiments, the latent possibilities of a box.” The book she published that year, Box Furniture, is indeed a testament to the possibilities of a box—and not just any box, but specifically the packing crates then used to ship all kinds of ordinary consumer goods. Brigham found in those humble, cheaply made boxes inspiration for a unique system of furniture design based entirely on recycled packing crates.

Art by DoppelHouse Press
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Contemplating Disembodiment in the work of Liat Yossifor

By Susan Power

Our experience of time and space has been radically disrupted by the threat of the pandemic; its scope and sobering impact both intimate and distant. Yet this existential crisis can promote a new way of being in the world. With so many aspects of our lives on hold, the current moment offers a rare opportunity to reflect upon the “state of things.” Like the eponymous 1982 film by Wim Wenders, which revolves around a science fiction film cast and crew stranded together on location when the production is stalled due to sudden lack of funds, Liat Yossifor’s latest body of work was on its way to Sydney, Australia for a solo show at Fox Jensen Gallery scheduled to open on March 28 when it became stranded in shipping crates, postponed in the voyage to its destination, and ultimately consigned to a screen…