The Egyptian Bureau for Cultural & Education Affairs is pleased to announce and invite you to the upcoming events:

 “Painting & Difference”, Exhibition by Dr. Dina El-Sioufi.

Painting and Difference is a play on Jacques Derrida, L’Ecriture Et La Difference (Writing and Difference), 1967. There, the French philosopher makes clear that every creative act; writing, poetry, painting, etc, is a form of other writing involving difference. Not only through what the author/artist is trying to convey in a work but also through the way each reader/spectator receives/understands this. Everyone’s work engenders multiple interpretations through each reader/spectator.

Dina’s work is an act of painting; a form of writing involving difference using ready-made elements and recreating them in each painting through imagination and the desire to bestow narrative. Based on chosen fragments of poetry, texts, images of artists’ work and their portraits after photographs, these are re-imagined in a form of painted “collage”. Double Entendre, 2019, is based on photographs of Anna Akhmatova in her home in Russia with faces from Dina’s imagination. Behind the seated figure is a dark flute player after Henri Rousseau, La Charmeuse de serpents, 1907. The lines by the standing figure are from Akhmatova1960s poems that express yearning, searching, loss, melancholy, repetitiveness of time and its passage.

Born in Alexandria, Dina grew up and studied in UK. After a BSc in Physics and Post-Graduate Diploma in Mathematical Physics at Kings College-London University, she turned to history of art studies in the 90’s. While working, she successfully completed MA in Modern French studies at Birkbeck-London University in 2000. She then obtained her PhD degree from UCL-London University in 2006. Dina then returned to painting, attending courses at Royal Drawing School, Heatherleys and France. Dina’s work is mainly figurative; she exhibited her work in several countries since 2013.

Opening on Wednesday 12th February 2020, 18:00-21:00 Exhibition continues to Wednesday 18th March Opening Hours:
Mondays-Thursdays: 11:00-16:00 | Fridays: 14:00-18:00 | Venue: Chesterfield Gardens 4 , London, W1J 5BG Tel: 0207491 7720