BIOGRAPHY
Born in Cairo, Egypt.
Cairo-based multidisciplinary new media audio-visual artist and illustrator whose work explores identity and examines how virtual and artificial environments, computational infrastructure, and massively distributed networks can challenge the boundaries of our senses. Her interdisciplinary approach includes studies across the traditional arts disciplines and an embrace of new technologies.
Castell’s work spans digital media and audio-visual installations, to more traditional forms such as paintings and illustrations. The focus of her attention is the sonority and functionality of immaterial illusions between the real and virtual world and the research of the new nature of art. She uses the digital space to develop expansive worlds that fiddles with the dynamic between her and her audience by creating storytelling atmosphere with objectified emotions that balances on the edge of warm-hearted intimacy and sentimental absence.
In her work, she creates her own digital dimension with its nonexistent characters and mythology. she not only explores the potential futures that these contemporary creations may hold, but also documents concepts and objects relevant to her life, allowing these worlds to double as personal time capsules, while addressing a range of serious issues including dissociation, psychological trauma and masochism in a nightmarish style depicting graphic sex, violence and the total incandescence of mental dissociation.
Castell Holds a BFA from College of Art Education at Helwan University of Cairo (Egypt). And known for her diversity between solo work, collaborations, performances and art installations.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Virtual space, self-consciousness, human identity, sonic ontology and the erotic theory of beauty and ugliness are all central themes in my work. In virtual space, “nature” can be redefined. Elements can be reconstructed, repositioned, reinterpreted, providing endless possibilities, making the virtual very real. While questioning self-consciousness as it does not take place within the anatomical confines of the bodyhood of the living systems that generate it, on the contrary, it is external to them and pertains to their domain of interactions as a matter of coexistence.
My work is rooted in conceptual art, taking the form of digital media, illustration, net art, video, and A/V installations that explore contemporary culture through a narrative while questioning human identity, and presenting a detached universe with portraits and stories of nonexistent characters that play a significant role in the trajectory of each of my projects.
My early ideals of ugliness and beauty were shaped by and linked through the anonymous dark corner of the Internet. Those virtual environments enabled me to rally against oppression, and discover the beauty in the obscurity. That rejects the triviality of sensory-oriented artistic philosophy, and works more towards discovering the experiential environments that art brings to us. This approach does not involve reducing the aesthetic pleasure of artworks at all, but it is to put them in a much richer setting in which much more magical work can be performed with liberty and unsettling part of the human mind.
There’s a heartbreaking and sentimental aspect to art that’s supposed to disturb human beings. It has its own beautiful and powerful aspects. It influenced the way I viewed myself, which led me to investigate the way our identities have been imagined and shaped by societal interpretations of beauty. Having one’s identity dismantled, marginalized and regulated to non-human status demands action. This led me to critically engage image-making in art, and ultimately grapple with whatever power and authority these images have over the human figure.
Although my works are fragmented, sensual and may be disturbing, they are an image of the energy that I create from the resilience of my own challenges. An escape from reality in the form of an uncanny gateway to another world, a sovereign dimensional world as in dissociation of consciousness, creating a simultaneity that allows for temporal immediacy and spatial isolation, bringing psychical connection in spite of physical separation.
Regardless of medium, my deeply considered approach allows me to go beyond realism and to give a different feel to my compositions. Although there may not always be material similarities between the different projects, they are linked by recurring formal concerns and through the subject matter. The subject matter of each body of work determines the materials and the forms of the work. Each project often consists of multiple works, often in a range of different media, grouped around specific themes and meanings. During research and production new areas of interest arise and lead to the next body of work.
CONTACT
