Something Else Symposium | The Echo of Stones in Unseen Wate

“Something Else: Symposium” embraces contemporary art's essence– its experimentation, spontaneity, and adaptability.
Since its inception in 2015, with the third and most recent edition held in 2023 at the Citadel of Saladin, the international contemporary art festival "Something Else" has established itself as a leading platform for contemporary art discourse. As a precursor to its fourth edition, the Something Else: Symposium adopts a more compact and intimate format, featuring the works of 54 artists and 10 curators from 15 countries while fostering closer interactions between art, artists and the public. It centres on eye-to-eye discourse and public engagement, aligning with Chief Curator Simon Njami’s call for emancipation – echoing Bob Marley’s famous lyric “emancipate yourself from mental slavery”.

On February 9, 2025, the AAIE curatorial project The Echo of Stones in Unseen Water officially debuted as part of the curatorial program Something Else Symposium at Something Else, Off Biennale Cairo. The exhibition is honoured to receive support from institutions such as the Embassy of Sweden in Egypt, the Embassy of Norway in Egypt, and the French Institute in Cairo.
The exhibition combines five artists from diverse cultural backgrounds—Li Xu, Zhang Weizhou, Huang Min, Vanshika Agrawal, and Marilena Sutera. Through mediums including painting, video, performance, and printmaking, they explore how individuals leave their echoes in the currents of history, society, and time within this city at the crossroads of Eastern and Western civilizations.
In Li Xu's work, Jingwei Fills the Red Sea, he draws on the Chinese myth of Jingwei Filling the Sea, juxtaposing cultural symbols of individual struggle from both Eastern and Western traditions. In the East, Jingwei, in solitude, endlessly carries stones to fill the sea, defying fate with relentless perseverance. In the West, Moses parts the Red Sea with divine power, leading his people across an insurmountable barrier.
When confronted with the forces of destiny and the collective, do individuals truly possess freedom? The artist embeds the allegories of Jingwei and Moses within the exhibition space, allowing their echoes to resonate.
Zhang Weizhou’s work, Does the Wind Know How to Read?, places a Chinese-French dictionary at a high point in Paris, awaiting the wind to “read” its pages. This act becomes a futile attempt at communication, a passive experiment, and a question posed to the world: In an era of overwhelming information, can the individual's voice still be heard?
Standing in the world's cracks, the artist confronts absurdity and powerlessness yet still chooses to let the wind turn the pages—tracing the imprints of language, one by one.
Huang Min’s work, China-China, depicts densely packed crowds arranged in a geographical formation, recreating the scenes of mass nucleic acid testing during the pandemic. Individual faces dissolve into the collective order, their identities obscured within the structure of the crowd.
With quiet restraint, the artwork reveals how individuals are absorbed into societal mechanisms. Can personality still exist when everyone is subsumed into a uniform system? In the exhibition space, as viewers’ gazes sweep across her painting, it feels like they are staring into a mirror reflecting reality.
Vanshika Agrawal records the passage of time through performance and material transformation. In We Will Meet After the Fall, ceramic beads are encased in ice, slowly melting and falling to the ground as the performance unfolds. In Feet of Clay, she walks barefoot over traditional Indian clay lamps, shattering them into dust.
This irreversible process symbolizes how individuals are shaped, fractured, and eventually erased within the structures of history and societal norms. As viewers pause to watch and listen to the sound of breaking ceramics, they see the fleeting nature of time itself.
Marilena Sutera’s prints evoke a sense of hidden ritual within the exhibition space. In Vestales with Landscape, five women move between landscape markers, carrying offerings. They are priestesses traversing different worlds as bridges between the sacred and secular. Her work explores how individuals navigate between the spiritual and the material, seeking an inner place of belonging within the external world.
Unseen Water, Echoing in This Moment
In this exhibition, every artwork raises questions rather than offering answers. Can individuals alter history? Will personal voices be swallowed by time? How do we define individual existence as the world grows larger and more complex? These questions resonate within the exhibition space at Darb 1718, like stones cast into unseen waters, creating ripples that spread outward.