We’re delighted to announce the three awardees for the second edition of Gypsum Bursaries, a stipend and support program offered to visual artists to support the realization of a publication. Gypsum Bursaries aims to generate new ways of thinking about art practice through working intimately with a larger community of artists, writers, and thinkers. The awardees have been chosen from 26 applications by a selection committee composed of Maha Maamoun, Mahmoud Khaled and Yasmine El Rashidi. Each awardee will be granted a sum of EGP 40,000 along with advisory support towards the development of an artist’s book.

Christopher Mahon is his name. Ireland is his nation. Cairo is his dwellingplace. And heaven is his expectation. 

Christopher Mahon, for a project that captures the process of creating his stone and brass sculptural works, Mahon seamlessly integrates his choreographic background. By weaving analog photography with receipts, texts, and notes from his studio, he not only documents the labor-intensive nature of his sculptures but also incorporates a subtle performative quality influenced by his background in movement and dance.

Sara Fakhry Ismail is a performance maker, facilitator and somatic practitioner. Through their work, Sara explores human and non-human embodiments in their relation to public and/or social space. In their practice, Sara considers emotion, sensation and movement as tangible information revealing individual and collective relationships to space. Sara's most recent works are in live performance, performative interventions, video installations and artist publications.

Sara Fakhry Ismail, as part of genena an artistic duo with Shahd El Sabbagh for the production of a collaborative artist book that attempts to extend lines across time through acts of remembrance and divination.The book journeys through personal narratives and archival images of gardens that disappeared from a neighborhood in Cairo.

*Photography by Eman Imam

Omnia Sabry’s practice is native to film, and departs to photography, book-making, and botany, sometimes extending to multimedia installation. She experiments with the materiality of film and the ephemerality of light. Her work maneuvers between language and image to conjure memories, shed light on unearthed histories, and dwell on places that no longer exist, are in transformation, or are yet to exist. 

Omnia Sabry, for a research project that examines the role of plants as active agents of history, Sabry approaches plants as spatial beings, delving into their architecture and their ability to both reflect and transmit images. 

*Image from the collaborative project with Mena El Shazly Walking Through a Nile Codex, 2021