Pretty interventions and good intentions Northern European cultural institutions in Cairo's contemporary culture scene after 2011

Cairo’s contemporary cultural field is generally structured by several interrelated dynamics. First, the dire sociopolitical and economic situation, second the crackdown on civil society in Egypt, and third the dominance of northern European cultural institutions in the field of contemporary art and culture. This thesis aims to examine the interconnections and links between European funders and the receivers of such funding in Cairo’s contemporary cultural scene after 2011, and to investigate how these relationships are regulated by hopes and aspirations, the local as well as global political context, the educational situation in Egypt and abroad, good intentions of solidarity, and global access to networks and knowledge. The thesis is based on ethnographic research conducted in Berlin and Cairo between 2011 and 2018. There are two central lines of discussion throughout the thesis: first, that European cultural funding mirrors a specific set of inherent liberal, secular and democratic morals and values which play a role in internal as well as external nation branding; and second that these funding dynamics perpetuate, rather than challenge, structural inequalities and in effect control access to (economic and social) possibilities.
The research is an attempt to situate the representation of post-uprising art practices within its neoliberal context. I start by introducing this framing by connecting local nation branding with the representation of the nation abroad. The examples show a neoliberal understanding of an economically productive and hence valuable individual, which means that difference is positively valorized without actually challenging structural differences of inequality that regulate access to social, cultural and economic capital. The link between the European self-image and an international image lays the foundation for this thesis, which combines an analysis of soft power, nation branding, cultural politics and the neoliberal effects of cultural programs, their discursive structures and wider politics.