Capturing Cairo’s design landscape from the 2016 Dubai Design Week
Egyptian designers making beautiful creations: Medrar TV covered the 2016 Cairo Now: A City Incomplete exhibition from Dubai’s Design Week, an event that captured Cairo’s current design landscape in October 2016. The exhibition included work by “designers who make purely Egyptian work, yet in new ways, work with Egyptian craftsmen and use local materials to make their new designs,” curator Mohamed El Shahed says. Besides designs for furniture, lighting fixtures, and recycled materials, the exhibition also included artwork showing a redesigned map for the Cairo Metro, fashion designs, rugs, signage, and comics. El Shahed also explained his vision for the exhibition and reflects on the context from which these creations emerged, including projects that document spontaneous street designs with examples for Cairo’s balconies and street chairs. El Shahed, unfortunately, says it is difficult to say that there is a “design scene” in Egypt now because there are no events like Cairo Now: A City Incomplete for local designer and no economy to support creativity in design (runtime 10:27). H/t Cairobserver