On Rock-Soft Matters is an immersive exhibition resulting out of one year of hybrid artistic/curatorial experimental research on ritual and contemporary art.
The project investigated whether qualities observed in ritual practices— like communitas, liminality (cfr. Victor Turner), immersion, repetition, and transcendence —could inform contemporary exhibition-making without reproducing ritual itself. Conceived of as a pilot project for a durational and iterative research, through three months of fieldwork in Egypt, including participation in Mawlid celebrations, Hadras, and daily prayer contexts, I examined how collective and spiritual experiences generate emotional intensity, presence, and connection.
The project investigated whether qualities observed in ritual practices— like communitas, liminality (cfr. Victor Turner), immersion, repetition, and transcendence —could inform contemporary exhibition-making without reproducing ritual itself. Conceived of as a pilot project for a durational and iterative research, through three months of fieldwork in Egypt, including participation in Mawlid celebrations, Hadras, and daily prayer contexts, I examined how collective and spiritual experiences generate emotional intensity, presence, and connection.
These observations were translated into curatorial decisions through exhibition design rather than direct representation. Principles such as prolonged duration, sensory immersion, attentiveness, repetition, vulnerability, and temporary separation from ordinary time informed the spatial and experiential structure of the exhibition. Display strategies which brought visitors closer to the ground and in intimate and direct contact with the 119 visual works selected, sound, movement, color symbolism, architectural interventions, and visitor circulation were conceived as meaning-producing elements rather than supporting devices. Every element was deliberately chosen, both in the artistic selection and in the exhibiting strategies. The exhibition functioned as a practical experiment in translating ritual dynamics into a contemporary art context while remaining attentive to questions of representation, mediation, and cultural responsibility.
The choice of the Egyptian context resulted from the collaboration with Seldon Institute, grantor of the project. Seldon provides a platform for thinkers, entrepreneurs and artists to engage their work with new audiences within expert and public communities to facilitate a more relevant and nuanced understanding of Islam. Including a non-Muslim perspective, yet one united by similar values and spiritual perspectives, was an intuition that founder of Seldon Dina Rehab had, to bring forth a message of universality and unity. The underlying principle consists in an understanding of Islam as a philosophy for human flourishing.
The choice of the Egyptian context resulted from the collaboration with Seldon Institute, grantor of the project. Seldon provides a platform for thinkers, entrepreneurs and artists to engage their work with new audiences within expert and public communities to facilitate a more relevant and nuanced understanding of Islam. Including a non-Muslim perspective, yet one united by similar values and spiritual perspectives, was an intuition that founder of Seldon Dina Rehab had, to bring forth a message of universality and unity. The underlying principle consists in an understanding of Islam as a philosophy for human flourishing.
As part of the research process, I created the experimental film A Sun in the Palm, a personal, unplanned for and genuine artistic elaboration of my spiritual and practical experience in Egypt. The film provided a space to process and translate the emotional intensity of the research, deepening my understanding of the themes explored in the exhibition.
An email feedback from journalist J.D.: “Hello Ms. Bastoni, I was fortunate to have a friend invite me to see A Sun in the Palm this past Saturday. I assented, knowing nothing about the film. I am so happy I did. Your film is transcendental. I have not seen anything quite like it before: the combination of human connections, imagery, and movement created an experience that was a kind of magical sensory meditation. I've been replaying parts of it since: Ahmed talking about time breathing, the idea of digging wells to make amends, the way the film demonstrated that motion pictures and still photography are very close siblings. By the fourth act, I was no longer even thinking about the film as I watched it, but simply experiencing it with an entirely open mind and open heart as its themes and images and people washed over me. And minutes later, the watchmaker poet recited "Be Gentle," and everything in life briefly paused and was perfect…”;
An email feedback from journalist J.D.: “Hello Ms. Bastoni, I was fortunate to have a friend invite me to see A Sun in the Palm this past Saturday. I assented, knowing nothing about the film. I am so happy I did. Your film is transcendental. I have not seen anything quite like it before: the combination of human connections, imagery, and movement created an experience that was a kind of magical sensory meditation. I've been replaying parts of it since: Ahmed talking about time breathing, the idea of digging wells to make amends, the way the film demonstrated that motion pictures and still photography are very close siblings. By the fourth act, I was no longer even thinking about the film as I watched it, but simply experiencing it with an entirely open mind and open heart as its themes and images and people washed over me. And minutes later, the watchmaker poet recited "Be Gentle," and everything in life briefly paused and was perfect…”;
Visitor responses suggested that the exhibition generated forms of emotional engagement often absent from conventional exhibition formats. Rather than emphasizing intellectual interpretation, audiences frequently described experiences of slowness, presence, vulnerability, and connection, reinforcing the potential of curatorial practice to operate as a transformative and relational medium. Meaningful and profound conversations between strangers emerged spontaneously. I was hugged
and gifted books, and personally thanked for creating such a space.
Future iterations would benefit from more sophisticated spatial interventions, stronger integration with architects and sensory designers, and the development of more rigorous methods for evaluating audience experience. The project also opened broader questions regarding the role of cross-cultural curatorial collaboration, and the possibility of designing exhibitions as infrastructures for human flourishing. Ultimately, the research suggests that exhibitions can be understood not simply as sites for displaying artworks, but as systems capable of shaping perception, relationships, and collective meaning-making.
and gifted books, and personally thanked for creating such a space.
Future iterations would benefit from more sophisticated spatial interventions, stronger integration with architects and sensory designers, and the development of more rigorous methods for evaluating audience experience. The project also opened broader questions regarding the role of cross-cultural curatorial collaboration, and the possibility of designing exhibitions as infrastructures for human flourishing. Ultimately, the research suggests that exhibitions can be understood not simply as sites for displaying artworks, but as systems capable of shaping perception, relationships, and collective meaning-making.
Artists and working team:
Hazem El Mestikawy (1965–2024) was a Swiss-Egyptian visual artist whose practice moved between architecture, sculpture, design, and drawing. He lived and worked between Cairo and Alexandria and exhibited internationally across Europe, North Africa, and beyond. His work combined references to ancient Egyptian and Islamic architecture with modernist and Bauhaus-influenced minimalism, earning him global recognition, including the Jameel Prize in 2011.
Working primarily with lightweight materials such as cardboard and paper, El Mestikawy created installations and sculptural forms that appeared solid and monumental despite their fragility. His practice explored structure, light, volume, and spatial perception, challenging the boundaries between permanence and ephemerality. Rooted in architectural thinking, his drawings and sculptures translated principles of precision, balance, and construction into restrained geometric compositions that engage both historical visual systems and contemporary abstraction.
Huda Lutfi is one of Egypt’s leading contemporary artists whose contribution since the early 1990s has amassed global recognition in numerous international art venues. Trained as a cultural historian, she had a long academic career before dedicating her time to producing art where her intimate knowledge of and engagement with multiple historical, aesthetic, and mystical traditions are not only inspirational but central to her art practice. Indeed, much, if not all, of her work can be considered a translation of her research in the academic world into images and symbols for the artistic one.
Her work is infused with a spiritual depth that is expressed in her use of poetry and texts, her incorporation of signs, script, and geometrical figures that are accentuated through the meditative power of repetition. Just as Lutfi’s work is marked by spontaneity, playfulness, and simplicity, it simultaneously invokes an inward psychological experience as well as spiritual stillness and steadfastness.
Marwan Fayed is an artist, architect and researcher whose work navigates the intersection of material memory and the philosophical dimension of decay. Further, his work as an architecture scholar addresses gaps between traditional architectural rigor and modern expressive forms, embodied memory of space, semantics of dematerialization and aesthetics of loss.
His current body of work This Flower Has A Shadow explores both somatic and botanical bio-forming as a door for higher poetic presences of contemplation. The series is in continual formation and it comprises more than 90 drawings, carried out since November 2024.
Nour El-Sherif is a multimedia artist. She is an artisan and a designer in the first place. Making is a way to respond to the need to understand how things exist. She works closely with paper — a material she has used since childhood and instinctively returns to as the starting point of all her practices — as well as with clay and textile. At the core of her artistic journey is a persistent need for contemplation as a reason to keep looking and living. The drawing series here exhibited is a private and intimate recollection of a persistent and deeply personal inquiry.
Chiara Bastoni is an artist-researcher and curator. She brings forth these two practices alongside one another, driven by the equal value she places on studying other artists’ work and on artistic expression. Both practices — if they are even distinguisheable — are research-based and share an intuitive and conceptual approach. She regards art as a tool for individual and, by extension, collective transformation, and works across multiple media. Through her own artistic practice, often in dialogue with the work of other artists, as well as through the conception of ambitious exhibitions, events, and happenings, she seeks to allow aspects of reality she considers foundational to humanity to emerge in a visceral and emotional way. Her work aims to create conditions for reconnection with who we are, and is guided by an intuitive, expansive and experimental approach.
Project coordination: Dina Rehab, Razieh Ghorbani
Scenography: Jack Magaw, Lara Musard
Graphic design: Amr Bakr
Hazem El Mestikawy (1965–2024) was a Swiss-Egyptian visual artist whose practice moved between architecture, sculpture, design, and drawing. He lived and worked between Cairo and Alexandria and exhibited internationally across Europe, North Africa, and beyond. His work combined references to ancient Egyptian and Islamic architecture with modernist and Bauhaus-influenced minimalism, earning him global recognition, including the Jameel Prize in 2011.
Working primarily with lightweight materials such as cardboard and paper, El Mestikawy created installations and sculptural forms that appeared solid and monumental despite their fragility. His practice explored structure, light, volume, and spatial perception, challenging the boundaries between permanence and ephemerality. Rooted in architectural thinking, his drawings and sculptures translated principles of precision, balance, and construction into restrained geometric compositions that engage both historical visual systems and contemporary abstraction.
Huda Lutfi is one of Egypt’s leading contemporary artists whose contribution since the early 1990s has amassed global recognition in numerous international art venues. Trained as a cultural historian, she had a long academic career before dedicating her time to producing art where her intimate knowledge of and engagement with multiple historical, aesthetic, and mystical traditions are not only inspirational but central to her art practice. Indeed, much, if not all, of her work can be considered a translation of her research in the academic world into images and symbols for the artistic one.
Her work is infused with a spiritual depth that is expressed in her use of poetry and texts, her incorporation of signs, script, and geometrical figures that are accentuated through the meditative power of repetition. Just as Lutfi’s work is marked by spontaneity, playfulness, and simplicity, it simultaneously invokes an inward psychological experience as well as spiritual stillness and steadfastness.
Marwan Fayed is an artist, architect and researcher whose work navigates the intersection of material memory and the philosophical dimension of decay. Further, his work as an architecture scholar addresses gaps between traditional architectural rigor and modern expressive forms, embodied memory of space, semantics of dematerialization and aesthetics of loss.
His current body of work This Flower Has A Shadow explores both somatic and botanical bio-forming as a door for higher poetic presences of contemplation. The series is in continual formation and it comprises more than 90 drawings, carried out since November 2024.
Nour El-Sherif is a multimedia artist. She is an artisan and a designer in the first place. Making is a way to respond to the need to understand how things exist. She works closely with paper — a material she has used since childhood and instinctively returns to as the starting point of all her practices — as well as with clay and textile. At the core of her artistic journey is a persistent need for contemplation as a reason to keep looking and living. The drawing series here exhibited is a private and intimate recollection of a persistent and deeply personal inquiry.
Chiara Bastoni is an artist-researcher and curator. She brings forth these two practices alongside one another, driven by the equal value she places on studying other artists’ work and on artistic expression. Both practices — if they are even distinguisheable — are research-based and share an intuitive and conceptual approach. She regards art as a tool for individual and, by extension, collective transformation, and works across multiple media. Through her own artistic practice, often in dialogue with the work of other artists, as well as through the conception of ambitious exhibitions, events, and happenings, she seeks to allow aspects of reality she considers foundational to humanity to emerge in a visceral and emotional way. Her work aims to create conditions for reconnection with who we are, and is guided by an intuitive, expansive and experimental approach.
Project coordination: Dina Rehab, Razieh Ghorbani
Scenography: Jack Magaw, Lara Musard
Graphic design: Amr Bakr