bio | Ania Szremski has been the curator at the Townhouse, one of Egypt’s longest running non-profit contemporary art spaces located in downtown Cairo, since 2011. She has recently curated exhibitions including “Social Security,” an open studio/residency program/event series exploring ideas of radical hospitality and alternative forms of sustainability; “Ugly Feelings,” a group exhibition looking at uncomfortable affective and aesthetic responses provoked by precarious situations; and the film series “The Featherweight Portable Cinema.” She is a founding member, editor and culture writer for Mada Masr, a bilingual news site that is Egypt’s leading voice in progressive journalism. Her writing has appeared in art21, Bidoun, Broadsheet, Egypt Independent, Motherwell and springerin (forthcoming), and she has spoken on panel discussions and at conferences including the Shifting Sands conference in Sydney and Adelaide, the Artists as Urban Catalysts panel in Cairo, and the Art of Scandal conference at York University, Toronto. She was nominated as a Global Art Forum Fellow in 2014, and received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2011 to pursue her research into the impact of cultural policy on artistic production in Egypt in the 1970s. Szremski received a dual MA in Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism and Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute in 2011, where she won a fellowship award for her thesis, “The Revolt of Objects: Abdel Hadi al-Gazzar and fear of things in post-colonial Egypt.”
Note: The biography describes the position of the narrator at the time of their participation in the Glossary of Common Knowledge. Given the long duration of the project, the narrator may have changed their respective position.
