Hamdi Attia
Born in Egypt 1964.
Lives and works between USA and Egypt.
Hamdi Attia studied Fine Arts in Cairo, Roma and received his MFA at the University of Pennsylvania. His work examines the relationship between cartography, geography, the body and power. It engages an experimental vocabulary, using video, mapping as well as drawings and sculpture. The noble failure of trying to make sense of our contemporary life reproduces itself in his practice, creating a successful platform for anti- idealism. Given the tools of this platform, Hamdi Attia is simultaneously interested in reconfiguring romanticized socio-political, cultural, or personal products and thoughts by addressing how they diverge and overlap. A part of his research focuses on analyzing the construction of geographic realities and addresses the translation of a fictional world into political geography, as an object of the all-powerful gaze of the cartographer. By making maps of an imaginary parallel world, he is addressing the arbitrary nature of maps, borders, and the modern nation-state.
