The past is always an invented land” Orhan Pamuk”
From the Amgad Naguib Collection
20 November - 1 February
Opening November 20th, 7pm
Townhouse Factory

The past is always an invented land is an un-curated mass of things from the collection of Amgad Naguib, downtown Cairo’s famed collector and dealer of objects, artworks, ephemera, and other relics of Egypt’s modernist past. Naguib’s extraordinarily rich collection is entirely kept intact: its chaotic composition and uncontrollable orchestration was directly transferred from his anarchic storage spaces downtown into the Townhouse gallery space. In the end, his collection is ruthlessly put on view with little regard for historical narrative or tidy curatorial statements to create an emphatically disorganized anti-exhibition

If this seems like an abusive treatment of historical objects, that is, perhaps, the point. In the end, this display forcefully rips these items from a carefully constructed and pernicious regime of nostalgia, a regime which has heretofore dulled the modern viewer’s critical faculties and painted a treacherously anodyne” portrait of the “good old days

What happens when the viewer is forced to confront these objects as disorderly things-in-themselves, shaken awake out of the comforting dream of an orderly past? What new connections, patterns, and narratives might emerge from this disruptive display that refuses the tyranny of the archive? This experiment in viewing asks the audience to lower the defense shield of sentiment and really look—look hard­—at the remains of history