Facts About Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival D-CAF
Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival is currently Cairo’s only and largest international multi-disciplinary contemporary arts festival. It takes place over three weeks each spring, since 2012, in multiple sites throughout Cairo’s city center capitalizing on its unique architectural and social heritage. Established one year after the 25th of January 2011 revolution D-CAF is an independent initiative of a group of independent organizations that seeks to reinvent the public space of downtown Cairo around a new vision where contemporary Art is an integral part of the socio-economic and political fabric of the Egyptian society.
D-CAF is now in the planning phase of its fifth edition to present cutting edge local, regional and international alternative theater and dance performances, music concerts, visual arts shows, film screenings, art lectures and workshops, by emerging and avant-garde artists from around the world. Along with providing a dense high-quality program of artistic events to a diverse public, D-CAF is concerned with introducing curatorial expertise in the disciplines it presents, as well as forging new collaborations between artists and spaces, and producing new work. Each edition, D-CAF collaborates with curators to develop the different elements of the festival thereby expanding its network and knowledge.
Over the past four editions, D-CAF has brought together hundreds of artists from all over the world in spite of a difficult and unstable political and cultural environment. The festival’s curators and staff continuously invest time and resources into forging new artistic collaborations, uncovering and utilizing new venues, producing new challenging work by both local and international artists, and providing audiences with diverse experiences and opportunities to access contemporary art. The festival aims to present intellectually and economically accessible cutting edge contemporary art works in order to reach the wider possible audience and to familiarize them with contemporary arts without diminishing the value of works presented. It is constantly reinventing public and private spaces in downtown to host performances and events, thus always surprising the audiences and the city. The festival aims to embrace modernity and to build on the desire of many in Egyptian society to explore different identities and to challenge traditional roles, demand basic social and political rights and guarantee freedom of expression. The festival sees itself as a space where important themes can be explored. A major objective is thus to present audiences with new creative visions for the future. Given this sensitive political and social environment, D-CAF fights to bring back culture and art at the center of the public space as a new way to express ideas and multiply exchanges between the artists and the audience and among the audiences themselves.
Downtown Cairo
One of the main aims of D-CAF is the revival and reclamation of Downtown Cairo as a vibrant cultural center, capitalizing on its unique architectural and social heritage. The festival also benefits from the fact that many of Cairo’s major independent cultural institutions are based in Downtown. D-CAF uses this to build on the existing cultural communities that these institutions have been creating over the last decade.
The festival takes place outside of traditional state venues both as a means of maintaining its artistic independence but also to generate a new conversation between audiences, artists and the city by using non-conventional sites such as historical buildings, storefronts, alleyways, and rooftops for performances, events, and arts exhibitions. By choosing non-traditional venues for arts exhibitions and performances, D-CAF intends to attract bystanders and art lovers to re-discover the heart of Downtown Cairo and attend arts events presented in an original way, out of galleries and institutions.
Mission
To produce a high-quality international contemporary arts festival in Downtown Cairo, showcasing local, regional and international artists and attracting diverse audiences from Egypt and abroad.
Vision
A well-planned, well-produced and well-publicised event that will be a rolemodel, not only for the arts, but also for other organisations, especially NGOs, across Egypt, and will help to contribute to a blooming local and regional contemporary arts scene.
Future Plans
D-CAF 2016- Fifth Edition
In 2016, D-CAF will seek again to present to the Egyptian audience, to the local artistic scene and to the international programmers who come to the festival, the latest trends in contemporary arts with both established and upcoming artists from various parts of the Arab world and in the different sections of the Festival’s programming. The festival thus aims to maintain a balanced programme of Arab and Western art and thus showcase trends not only in Europe and America, but also across the region in which the festival is based and that the festival hopes to most influence. The festival will seek to ensure that the selection of Arab artists at D-CAF 2016 provides something quite different, representing a variety of countries across the region and from countries that have not been represented in previous editions.
Arab Arts Focus- Second edition
In 2016, the Arab Arts Focus will widen its scope, including an even stronger programme of local and regional artworks by established and emerging Arab artists across disciplines, and inviting an even wider range of programmers from the five continents. The overall objective of the focus is to support the development of a sustainable professional contemporary arts sector in Egypt and the Arab world, one that will allow artists and arts professionals working in contemporary cultural production to contribute to a flourishing regional arts scene, and to show their creative work beyond regional borders.
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