Client: Art D'Egypte

Location: Cairo, Egypt

Completion date: 2021

Project Team

Artists

Shuster and Moseley

Shuster and Moseley

Art Consultant

Espace

Commisioner/Curator

Art D'Egypte

Project Engineers

Cundall

Lead Contractor

Derix

Local Contractor

Hany Saad

Local Contractor

Decorative Glass

Overview

A composition of four large-scale geometric glass sculptures (‘Glyphs’) commissioned for Forever is Now, the first ever exhibition of contemporary art presented at the Great Pyramids of Giza. The work counterbalances expressions of geometric form and measure that are aligned to celestial points and stellar horizons, creating a kind of optical clockwork that reveals itself in an ever-shifting paradigm of illuminated planes.

Goals

The work aimed to interface between the viewer and the cosmos, with geometric shapes counterpoised to create glyphic expressions that are balanced on the terrestrial horizon but activated by the path of the sun and stars. Through this interdimensionality, the screenic interfaces open up an experience of the present to both the ancient world and to our future technological landscape.

Process

The work was specially commissioned for Forever is Now, the first ever exhibition of ten international contemporary artists at the Great Pyramids of Giza. The sculptures are created from precision cut, mitred and bonded large sheets of optically coated glass. Behind the abstract simplicity of the forms is a matrix of symbolic angles, measures and orientations, each carefully encoded with significations inspired by the optico-geometric magic of the Great Pyramids. The glass itself, whilst reflecting a future oriented aesthetic reminiscent of technological interfaces and contemporary architectures, in fact becomes an intermediary suspended between materiality and transparency; the visible and the invisible.