Echoes of Home
2nd Annual Exhibition
 Curated by Dario Mohr, Founder & Director, AnkhLave Arts Alliance
Darb 1718 | Off-Biennale | Cairo, Egypt

Echoes of Home returns for its second annual presentation at Darb 1718 as part of Cairo’s Off-Biennale, grounding itself in Egypt: the ancestral wellspring of the ankh, one of humanity’s most enduring symbols of life, continuity, and spiritual passage. This exhibition understands the ankh not as a static icon, but as a living principle: a bridge between past, present, and future, and a reminder that cultural life is sustained through transmission, remembrance, and creative renewal.

AnkhLave Arts Alliance embodies the essence of the ankh by acting as a conduit for generational continuity. The organization’s name: AnkhLave (pronounced Enclave) invokes the intentional act of leaving life behind: the passing of cultural knowledge, memory, and creative power from one generation to the next. This exhibition frames art-making as an act of inheritance and offering, where artists carry forward ancestral wisdom while reshaping it through contemporary form, material, and voice.

Echoes of Home brings together artists whose practices reflect lived connections to ancestry, migration, land, ritual, and collective memory. “Home” here is not fixed or singular; it is an echo that is resonant, shifting, and carried within the body and imagination. The works presented speak to how identity is formed through movement and return, loss and reclamation, displacement and rootedness. In Cairo, a city layered with millennia of cultural memory, these echoes are amplified, inviting dialogue between ancient lineages and present-day creative urgencies.

Following last year’s presentation of 32 Black artists at Tafaria Castle and Center of the Arts in Kenya, this second edition expands AnkhLave’s vision to include a broader range of artists of color, in alignment with the organization’s mission to foster cross-cultural solidarity grounded in shared ancestral consciousness. This expansion does not dilute the focus, but deepens it—recognizing that interconnected histories of survival, resistance, and creativity span continents and communities.

At Darb 1718, Echoes of Home becomes both offering and invocation: a space where contemporary artists honor what came before, claim the present, and imagine futures rooted in care, continuity, and cultural life force. In the spirit of the ankh, the exhibition affirms that art is not merely made: it is carried, entrusted, and passed on.