Dina Danish

Shmina Shmanish

12 March until 16 April 2011

Saturday 2 April, 16.00h - Performance of Kurt Schwitters Ur Sonata by Dina Danish

Press Release

Jeanine Hofland Contemporary Art proudly presents Shmina Shmanish, the first solo exhibition of Egyptian artist Dina Danish (1981, FR/EG) at the gallery.

The title of the exhibition, Shmina Shmanish, bends the artist’s name into the Yiddisch tradition of adding -shm to the beginning of a word to indicate irony, derision or skepticism towards the subject. This interest in absurdity, misunderstanding, mistranslation and superstition is a strongly recurring theme in Danish’ art practice, which combines a conceptual art’s preoccupation with language and structure.

A great influence to Danish’ work is the Greek mythology of Procrustes, which has been used by Jacques Derrida as criticism on structural forms. Procrustes was known for attacking people, stretching them, and cutting off parts of their legs in order to fit them on an iron bed. Here standardization and sameness are put into question. Danish is interested in this idea in its visual as well as its literary sense. It is in fact the perverted obsession with standardization that fuels some of the artist’s ideas. Her main focus is on the frustrated need to violently and constantly re-create a specific structure, resulting to a standard unchangeable form. Because of Procrustes unnatural violent acts, the result is always crippling and therefore resulting to failure. Danish’ work does not attempt to achieve sameness, but rather shows the failure of it in a rather critical deconstructionalist manner.

Dina Danish (1981, Fr/ EG) was born in Paris, grew up in Cairo and currently lives and works in both Amsterdam and Cairo. Her work has been exhibited nationally, and internationally. These include Kunsthall Oslo, SFMOMA in San Francisco, CIC in Cairo in collaboration with Kunshalle Bern, Townhouse Gallery in Cairo and San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. She has received awards such as Headlands Center for the Arts Graduate residency award as well as the Barclay Simpson Award, and was a finalist for ‘SECA Art award’ at SFMOMA in San Francisco (CA).
The artist has represented the Cairo Pavilion at Mediamatic in the Amsterdam Biennale and participated at the 41st Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam: Singing Reality. Between 2009 and the end of 2010 Dina Danish was an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten Amsterdam and this year she will be participating in the Fondazione Spinola Banna Per L'Arte residency program in Turin.

Download this press release here(.pdf)