Ahmed El Gendy

Ahmed El Gendy

Course
DAS Choreography
Class
2024

My artistic practice dives-in and floats-through togetherness, proximity, and entanglement. I often work in collaboration, engaging with the materiality of ropes, water, and heavy bodies.

For my current research at DAS Choreography, I have been initiating new connections where bodies get to relate with each other ‘otherwise’. I am interested in the idea that ‘distance’ and ‘duration’ are quantifiers and qualifiers of relationships. In this way, the longer I place myself close with something/someone is a direct measurement of our relation. Those relations thereby describe who we are becoming – since we ‘are’ our relationships.

If ‘relay’ is the act of passing something from one person to the next; then the moving body that being passed itself is in a state of transitioning from a relationship with one situation towards a relationship with another situation.. I am curious about those movements of transition.. spaces in-between.. contexts of transfer.. actions of communication.. modes of passing-over..

In November 2023, I have conducted a project where I encountered 6 strangers consecutively, spending 24-hours with each of them without speaking. It was to set a condition of close proximity and a long consistent duration for a relationality where we do not immediately rely on verbal language. While human people typically get to know each other through conversation, I was curious about how/if we could get familiar with each other’s ways-of-being otherwise.

What happens in my body when moving between attending to one new relationship to the next?.. Where/when does oneself ‘end’ and the next person begin?.. How does it feel to be arriving at the ‘next’ situation?.. How/does my moving body separate from the ‘previous’ situation?.. How far could someone’s sticky-networks of already-existing relations sustain new connections with further movements?..

 

Ahmed El Gendy (Cairo, 1987) is an artist and choreographer based in the Netherlands. They/He studied dance at Studio Emad Eddin Foundation in Cairo (2011), and holds a bachelor’s degree in choreography from the SNDO – School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam (2019). Their work through video and live performance is physically experimenting with notions of agency and interdependence.

Working as a performer on film, theatre and dance creations, Ahmed has collaborated with Arno Schuitemaker, Mohamed Shawky Hassan, Olivier Dubois, Andreas Hannes, Laurence Rondoni, Sandrine Maisonneuve, Laila Soliman, Adham Hafez, Shaymaa Shoukry, and Joaquin Wall.

Ahmed’s artistic works have been presented at Mediterranea 16 Biennale in Ancona, Italy (2013), and at Festifreak International Festival for Independent Cinema in La Plata, Argentina (2019)

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