Maha Maamoun

Currently Maamoun co-curates the exhibition How to Maneuver: Shape-Shifting Texts and Other Publishing Tactics that takes place at Warehouse421 in Abu Dhabi till 16 February 2020.

In 2018, Maha Maamoun joined the Forum Expanded (Berlinale) curatorial team - Visual Art - Arts & Culture|website=Ahram Online|language=en|access-date=2019-12-11}}</ref> The same year she co-founded Kayfa-ta, a non-profit Arabic publishing initiative. In 2014 she curated shows at Sharjah Art Gallery at the American University of Cairo and film program in Wiener Festwochen at Künstlerhaus in Vienna.

In 2018 Maamoun for the first time joined the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, Berlinale, as a part of curatorial team of "Forum Expanded". The same year she moderated ‘Projections’ panel discussion on independent cinema and screening platforms during the 2018 March Meeting in Sharjah.

Occupying disparate temporal and spatial registers, Dear Animal aimed to raise thoughts about our relationship to power, violence, and the unfamiliar. The film suggests power relations were so up-ended by the revolution that people even started questioning the categories that separate animals from human. Dear Animal was in The Short Film program at Art Basel film festival in 2017 and was named in highlights of the festival by CNN. It was also shown at the Sharjah Art Foundation in 2016.

Her work was also shown in biennials and festivals including the 6th Dak’art Biennale, Dakar; Bamaco 03, Mali; 9th Gwangju Biennale; Sharjah Biennial 10; Transmediale 2014, Berlin and 64th Berlinale, Berlin.

Domestic Tourism I: Park depicts young couples huddled on benches in front of the state headquarters for public administration at one end of Tahrir Square, at the symbolic heart of the capital and the site, six years later, of Egypt’s 2011 revolution. The street lights with an abnormal intensity in the daytime scene and the oversaturated color of well-worn grass and strangled foliage looks unnatural in this notoriously polluted urban hub.

The film Night Visitor: The Night of Counting the Years, compiled from mobile phone footage posted on YouTube, documents the break-in at the State Security buildings in Cairo and Damanhur in 2011. It takes us through previously impenetrable structures, from secret prisons up to lavish offices of government officials.

Her recent video works consider the capacity of images to function critically in a variety of political, social and cultural contexts. Maamoun is specifically interested in urban fabric of her home city Cairo, drawing attention in her photographic works to the visual contradictions that surround her. Her generic visual representations of Cairo explore how images intersect with, and are negotiated by, personal experiences. She reflects on generic and overused national symbols and the ways in which they have been appropriated to construct personal narratives and collective histories. Since 2007 she is working on projects that take as their starting point the Pyramids of Giza as a visual and literary image.

Maha Maamoun (born 1972, Oakland, California), is an Egyptian award-winning visual artist and curator based in Cairo. She is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC), an independent non-profit space for art and culture founded in Cairo in 2004. She also co-founded the independent publishing platform called Kayfa-ta in 2013. She was awarded the Jury Prize for her film Domestic Tourism II at Sharjah Biennal 9 (2009). Maamoun is a fellow of the Academy of the Arts of the World.

Maha Maamoun was born in Oakland, California in 1972 and grew up in Cairo. She studied Economics and received an MA in Middle Eastern History. In 2004 Maamoun co-founded the independent non-profit space for art and culture: Contemporary Image Collective (CiC) in Cairo. Besides her artistic practice in photography and video, she collaborates on independent publishing and curatorial projects. Maamoun was the co-curator of International Visual Arts Festival PhotoCairo3 in Cairo in 2005 and assistant curator for Meeting Points 5 in Berlin in 2007.