Amr Elkafrawy
Amr El Kafrawy works on the concept of urbanism and its relationship with the collective memory as well as investigating the aesthetics of landscapes. His artwork covers cities and urban sprawls as a result of political and social events, and the impact cities have on their residents. El Kafrawy's artwork significantly uses photography as a visual medium that can be used freely; it can be adjusted, added to, or removed from. El Kafrawy was born in 1980. He lives and works between Cairo and Montreal. Amr received his Bachelor of Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University, in 2003, and his Master's degree from Concordia University in Canada in 2020. Since the start of my artistic career, I have experimented with multiple art forms but have found myself most keen on Photography, drawing, painting and printing. I find myself always returning to classical forms as the drive for my own mode of self-expression, especially in regard to concepts that I am most intrigued by like the city, urbanization, and the social relations that develop within them. I always carry my camera around the city during my daily journeys to capture the presence of life in front of me, then for long hours, I go through the many spontaneous photographs that I took. I never know what caused me to identify with this photo or that; is it because of a strong presence? Or because of absolute solitude? I am interested in the poetics of spaces and the aesthetics of cityscapes, Urbanism and what inspires me the most are cities. I consider myself as a cityscape artist, sometimes I work with different concepts but I always go back to make more and more work about cities, and how they represent a collage of lives and destinies of their residents and visitors; of finding and defining the similarities and differences between people, buildings, districts, and streets in multiple different cultures and creating a visual pattern of these concepts. I would like to understand the impact of the cities on their residents; how cities were created and evolved, and what is the history of the buildings themselves. Also, I am interested in combining different art forms like poetry, photography, documents, drawings, maps, and old photography to recreate realistic prospects that reflect my ideas. My work repeatedly involves sets of images that complement each other. I use photography and laser digital printing, following which I paint over them with watercolors and ink to recreate realistic visual concepts. This technique allows me to evoke realistic scenes that intensify a dreamy and mysterious dimension to the way I reconstruct my experience about the city. Formalization of new cities and their relationship to the collective memory. My practices involve printing, drawing, and water-coloring as well as experimenting with paper and largescale images.