Our Vision:
Behna Foundation seeks to contribute to the cultural and artistic reality of the city of Alexandria and the local and regional environment by activating a cultural and artistic program and an arts training program, offered to the public free of charge, and engaging with concepts of contemporary art and the process of its production. It also provides the opportunity to host and display local and international artistic productions that help build critical and analytical thinking, and rethink the fixed and rigid in the process of artistic production and its reception, thus reshaping rooted cultural concepts such as archives and museums and their virtual relationship with the audience.
Our Geographical Environment:
Behna is situated in the heart of Alexandria city in Manshya, where it collaborates with other spaces be it local, regional or international, presenting various art scenes to the Alexandrian audience.
Behna engages heavily in artistic training and sponsoring local young talents, and seeks to network with artistic institutions throughout Egypt and abroad.
We target:
The audience of Alexandria and its residents aged 18 and above, without any restrictions or conditions.
Young artists and art students in Alexandria or those who have the ability to physically be in Alexandria, from nearby governorates.
Our resources:
“wekalet Behna” space is currently our largest resource, as well as “Plateau Behna”, a space established in Fouad street, providing more studio spaces for artists and more versatile venues for various artistic and cultural events.
The collection of artistic possessions of Mr. Bazil Behna is also an important resource that we invest in during parts of our research and production, especially when it comes to the history of the film industry in the city.
Finally, we always consider Behna’s team to be its most important resource.
Our general goals are:
- Activating artistic and cultural programs that engage critically with the reality of artistic practices.
- Providing artistic, research, and knowledge production for our target audience.
- Providing a distinguished artistic service to our clients in training, documentation, and artistic techniques.
projects and programs:
We are quite flexiable and open to the changing needs of the art and culture scene as we focus on three main programs:
- Behna’s educational tracks.
- Hosting artistic and cultural research.
- Live and Virtual Events that are open to the public.
We also run an independent program for the digitization of the Egyptian cinema archive.
Since 2019, we have participated in several projects as a result of our main programs, including: Archive Magic, Khamasi, Chasers, North Africa, Behna Studio, and others.