14 - Abraaj Group Art Prize

Transcription

Kader Attia &
Laurie Ann Farrell
Hala Elkoussy &
Jelle Bouwhuis
Marwan Sahmarani &
Mahita El Bacha Urieta
Contents
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6
Marwan Sahmarani
The Feast of the Damned
Map of the MENASA Region
(Middle East, North Africa & South Asia)
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8
Foreword by the Chair of the
Abraaj Capital Art Prize, Savita Apte
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11
Cities in Focus
Exhibition Schedule
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13
Nadia Al Issa
The Years of the Underdogs and
their Establishment
Kader Attia
History of a Myth:
The Small Dome of the Rock
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Laurie Ann Farrell
The Life of a Myth
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82
Nadira Laggoune
Contemporary art in Algeria,
a changing scene
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Hala Elkoussy
Myths & Legends Room – The Mural
Sarah Rifky
Cairo, Art and the Politics
of the Spectacle
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95
Jelle Bouwhuis
Selection Committee &
Acknowledgements
BLACK SEA
CASPIAN SEA
Turkey
Tunisia
Syria
3
Lebanon
Israel
Palestine
Jordan
M E D I T E R R A N E A N SEA
Morocco
1
Algeria
Libya
2
Egypt
RED SEA
Iran
Afghanistan
Iraq
Pakistan
Kuwait
ARABIAN GULF
Bahrain
Qatar
United Arab
Emirates
Saudi Arabia
Bangladesh
Dubai
India
Oman
Sudan
Yemen
ARABIAN SEA
Sri Lanka
Map of MENASA Region
(Middle East, North Africa & South Asia)
1
Kader Attia &
Laurie Ann Farrell (USA)
2
Hala Elkoussy &
Jelle Bouwhuis (The Netherlands)
3
Marwan Sahmarani &
Mahita El Bacha Urieta (Spain / Lebannon)
Foreword
Each year the aspirations and successes of artists from the Middle East, North Africa
and South Asia (MENASA) increase, and the international art world has started to sit
up and take notice. It is an exciting time to be involved in the visual arts in this part
of the world, with a constant stream of new galleries, museums, foundations and art
events emerging. The Abraaj Capital Art Prize gives unprecedented support to artists
from this region to realize projects and produce serious new artwork in collaboration
with curators who have a global scope.
This catalogue celebrates the second year of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Unique in
rewarding proposals rather than completed works of art, the commitment of both
the artists and curators – who are given the prize and the Selection Committee who
chose them – is significant. The artworks produced are standalone new works, highly
ambitious and complex in scale and subject matter. The process from application to
display spans more than a year. The second year of winning artworks discussed in this
catalogue are History of a Myth: The Small Dome of the Rock by Kader Attia (Algeria), made
in collaboration with curator Laurie Ann Farrell (US); Myths & Legends Room – The Mural
by Hala Elkoussy (Egypt) with curator Jelle Bouwhuis (The Netherlands), and The Feast
of the Damned by Marwan Sahmarani (Lebanon) with curator Mahita El Bacha Urieta
(Spain / L ebanon).
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Unveiled in March 2010 at Art Dubai, the region’s leading contemporary art fair,
they were subsequently exhibited for three months at the Dubai International Financial
Centre and the Museum of Arts & Design in New York. A People’s Choice voting
system was put into place this year so the public could choose their favorite of the
three winners. This was won by Sahmarani with El Bacha Urieta. The three winning
artworks comment on each of the artist’s individual experience growing up in the
region. Attia’s project comments on the profound effect the Dome of the Rock in
Jerusalem has had on him and his practice. Elkoussy focuses on her native city of
Cairo, and Sahmarani combines the violent history of the region while working in
traditional media inspired by artists of the Renaissance.
The relationships all three artists had with their curators, who submitted their original
proposals, was pivotal in the production of the final artwork. This catalogue, through
their essays, gives the curators a platform from which to analyze the artworks in depth,
as well as the process through which artist and curator went during the production
period. As a new addition, we have commissioned three experts based in Algiers, Cairo
and Beirut to write short essays focusing on the artistic climate in these key cities
from which our winning artists originate. I would like to thank the writers, Nadira
Laggoune, Sarah Rifky and Nadia Al Issa for their contributions. In this way, the
annual Abraaj Capital Art Prize catalogue seeks to act as a record of contemporary art
practice in the MENASA region.
Corporate patronage of the arts is central to its success. The Abraaj Capital Art Prize
is made possible by the generosity of Abraaj Capital, the largest private equity group
in MENASA. Abraaj Capital is dedicated to empowering potential and investing in
foresight across the region, and plays an active role in the direction of the prize.The
Selection Committee has been in place for the first three editions of the prize. As
Chair, I would like to acknowledge gratefully the immeasurable assistance and insight
of Antonia Carver, Daniela da Prato, Ali Khadra, Elaine Ng, John Martin, Maya
Rasamny, Lowery Stokes Sims and Frederic Sicre. I leave you to the words of our three
winning curators and welcome you to the 2010 Abraaj Capital Art Prize.
— Savita Apte, Chair, Abraaj Capital Art Prize
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Exhibition Schedule 2010
17 – 20 March
Unveiled at Art Dubai
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
31 March – 30 June
Dubai International Financial Centre
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
31 August – 10 October
Museum of Arts & Design
New York, United States
Kader Attia
History of a Myth:
The Small Dome of the Rock
Curated by
Laurie Ann Farrell
Laurie Ann Farrell
The Life of a Myth
Myth, which comes from the Greek word mythos, is “a traditional story of ostensibly
historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a
practice, belief, or natural phenomenon.” 1 Akin to many constructions in the world,
myths have a point of origin, a lifespan and then either outlive their use value or
become a surrogate for truth. Kader Attia’s newest installation History of a Myth: The
Small Dome of the Rock provides space for viewers to immerse themselves in recreated visual
and audio qualities of its sacred namesake that over time and through abstraction
retains its power and significance.
Attia’s new work reflects on the contentious historical terrain of the Dome of the Rock
in Jerusalem. Simultaneously this work offers a contemplative space where viewers
can meditate on the projection of his readymade brass-bolt and silver-nut miniature
sculpture magnified to many times its actual size. Once projected to a monumental scale
the very small assemblage evokes an architectural representation of the Dome of the Rock.
Images of the tiny sculpture projected through a live camera feed also become the
reference for an emblematic monument of architecture of Arab-Muslim history, and
then by association of the most complex contemporary conflicts. The audio component
recreates the auditory experience of Attia’s visit to the monument where he recalled
Top: Kader Attia, Untitled 1, 2010
Right: Kader Attia, Untitled 2, 2010
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The Old City of Jerusalem, including the Dome of the Rock, as seen from the Mount of Olives, 2009
Kader Attia, History of a Myth: The Small Dome of the Rock installation view, Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2010
being surprised by the peacefulness of a gentle breeze blowing and birds chirping.
Attia has translated this experience with the recorded soundtrack of charged wind
emanating through four small speakers, giving the illusion that the enveloping sound
is coming from the small architectural sculpture.
In 2008 – 0 9 Attia exhibited site-specific displays of his hallmark Untitled (Skyline)
installation of mirrored refrigerators at the ACA Gallery of the Savannah College of Art
and Design (SCAD) in Atlanta, and later in the Red Gallery at SCAD Savannah. Emulating an urban cityscape of anywhere, the assemblage of sparkling towers was inspired
by the towering housing complexes of the Parisian banlieues (suburbs). Constructed as
part of Barron Haussmann’s, modernist legacy these concrete towers would also manifest in Algiers through the government building campaign of French architect Fernand
Pouillon. Echoing the Parisian central city plan, which was built to control the flow of
traffic and potential civil unrest, the resultant quality of life also served as source
material for Attia’s Normal City trilogy of capturing unnoticed, even slightly abject
living conditions of the upward reaching concrete living structures lining the suburbs.
Attia states that there are elements of biographical history in this work. “Two of the
segments in this three-segment film were filmed and realized in my home neighborhood –
the one where my mother is still living, along with some of my brothers – the place where
I grew up. It is between Garges-lès-Gonesses and Sarcelles in France, north of Paris.
And what is important in this work is that I am trying to represent what exists between
fiction and reality. That’s why it’s called Normal City – because everything is natural.
I didn’t use digital or special effects. Everything was filmed as it exists.” 2 Passing back
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Aesthetic, cultural, philosophical and social theories all buttress the conceptual
underpinnings of Kader Attia’s installations, photographs and films. Well versed in
French theory, art history, and drawing inspiration from his personal history
encompassing both Algeria and France, Attia’s oeuvre is a compendium of poetry,
reflection and awareness. A survey of Attia’s working method and conceptual approach
reveals that while each new series employs different materials, symbols and scale,
Attia’s practice continually returns to a sustained look at the poetic dimensions and
complexities of contemporary life.
Kader Attia, Untitled (Skyline) installation view, ACA Gallery of SCAD, Atlanta, Georgia, 2008
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through the monumental cityscape of mirrored refrigerators the installation opened out
onto a bright room of photographs featuring populated images of the Rochers Carrés
constructed beach of concrete blocks built to keep Algerians landlocked by the perilous
gaps between the blocks.
When asked how his History of a Myth work related to his earlier explorations of
architecture’s relationship to nation building and Modernism, Attia replied, “The Dome
of the Rock actually represents an important monument in both contemporary political
culture and in the historical past. My previous works on the roots of Modernism
(especially on the works of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier) has been influenced by
the Algerian architecture of Ghardaïa. Then through the archaeology of this modernity, I’m
trying to understand first where this came from and why, and then to provide a critique
of the failure of modernity in general. History of a Myth is a project that both critiques
the perception that Western countries have about the contemporary and political history
of the area of Jerusalem.” 3
Top: Kader Attia, Normal City installation view, ACA Gallery of SCAD, Atlanta, Georgia, 2008
Above: Kader Attia, Signs of Reappropriation installation view, ACA Gallery of SCAD, Atlanta, Georgia, 2008
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Attia highlights the manner in which architecture (like any other field in the human
creativity) encapsulates in its very forms the circumstances that surround its conception
and construction. “When architecture is built, it is never built by others; it is maybe
the great difference between architecture and art. Even if in previous times an
authority commissioned art, most artists today create their art without specific orders.
Architecture is totally different. Architecture has first to do with politics, with the
political order. It is always a political or religious order or power that commissions an
architect to build a monument. That is why I’m very fascinated by architecture
because generally when I say art asks questions and architecture gives answers, it is more
because as an answer to an order, architecture has to do with the economic, political
and cultural issues of its time, but the more architecture exists through time, the freer
it becomes and the more it becomes a marker of its time. Architecture is less interesting
in its own contemporaneity. To appreciate architecture we need time. During its own
time, a monument is not so strong. What I like very much with the Dome of the Rock
is that it is at the center of a conflict between Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities
in Jerusalem. Each community makes claims on the history, meaning and significance
of this area of the Old City of Jerusalem. The Jewish sources claim the Temple of
Solomon was built in this area, some sources believe Crusaders built the Dome to
conceal a rock suspended in mid air, whereas the Muslims claim that Mohammed
came here and used the rock to ascend to paradise.” 4
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Kader Attia, Signs of Reappropriation lecture, SCAD Trustees Theater, Savannah, Georgia, 2009
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Kader Attia, Sleeping from Memory installation view, ICA Boston, Massachusetts, 2007
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History of a Myth: The Small Dome of the Rock creates an experience for visitors. The artist
presents the beauty of the architectural monument that is often forgotten amongst
the debates and disagreements. In his seminal text The Dome of the Rock, historian and
archeologist Oleg Grabar posits that there are four ways to think about the monument
in our contemporary times. “First, the building can be thought of as a political symbol
of an Islam-dominated but not exclusively Muslim Palestine. And as such it can be
transformed into a place for legitimating power.” 5 Second, the Dome of the Rock can
be revered as a Muslim holy place. Third, the monument can be considered a work
of world art to be appreciated on an aesthetic level. And finally, Grabar suggests,
“this monument can be considered the temporary occupant of a Jewish holy space,
The Temple Mount – the site of the destroyed Temple of Jerusalem, which according
to Jewish religious law, cannot be rebuilt until the coming of the Messiah.” 6 He
closes by suggesting that all of these considerations together put the monument in an
historical limbo.
The exterior of Attia’s History of a Myth is a perfect black cube formally recalling the Kaaba
located near the center of the Great Mosque in Mecca. Visitors to Attia’s structure enter
through an open doorway and proceed down a dark hallway towards light and sound.
The installation space is dimly lit by the live-feed projection of Attia’s miniature
readymade dome affixed to the side of a large canvas screen. After viewers’ eyes adjust
to the muted light level senses turn to a recorded audio track of reverberating sound
similar to that found at a grand esplanade flooding the space. Attia states that his
experiential installations are meant to create mirrors for his audience. “People don’t
really look at a work – they look at the mirror it holds up to them. And this leads to
very personal things happening. There are questions about egos, phobias, traumas
and auto-analyses, but with the possibility of aesthetic bridges, notably in formal terms,
between the artist and the public.” 7
The edge of Attia’s practice cuts sharply across simulated ephemeral realities and
longstanding deep human concerns. With earlier works such as the clothed birdseed
children being consumed over time by live pigeons in Flying Rats (2005), or a room of
memory foam beds of Sleeping from Memory (2007), bodies, with life forms carved out
leaving permanent impressions of reclining bodies Attia playfully illustrates notions of
emptiness and fullness. “Emptiness is not only something physical, something concrete;
it is psychological. I think it is existential; and obviously, it is also political.” 8 In
Attia’s terms, emptiness represents a stark contrast to excess, overconsumption and, by
extension, moral obviation. During a recent lecture Attia created beautiful sculptures
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Kader Attia, Flying Rats installation views, Biennale of Lyon, France, 2005
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on stage using polychromatic plastic bags. Positioning them in a neat row along a
table, viewers became privy to Attia’s demonstration of the significance of the space
both filling the interior and buttressing the exterior of the bags. These concepts
resonate profoundly within the chamber of his newest installation.
Visitors to Attia’s installation experience the peacefulness of being bathed in the light from
the projection and the accompanying serenity of the audio component. Individuals will
bring their own personal interpretations of the Dome of the Rock into the space as they
experience the symbolic shape of the iconic dome. As an artist and storyteller, Attia
suggests that everything can change if one changes one’s mind. Through the simple gesture
of pairing down the monument to a readymade sculpture, Attia also reminds us that there
are poetic gestures infused in everything that surrounds us, if we are able to see them.
Gratitude and many thanks to Kader Attia for being so generous with his time and information and for
entrusting me to curate his participation in the 2010 Abraaj Capital Art Prize.
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3
4
5
6
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8
1
myth. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2010.
Merriam-Webster Online. 3 March 2010 www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myth.
For more see Interview: Laurie Ann Farrell and Kader Attia in Kader Attia: Signs of Reappropriation
(Savannah: Savannah College of Art and Design, 2009).
Conversation with the artist, January 2010.
Conversation with the artist, January 2010.
Oleg Grabar, The Dome of the Rock (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2006), 211.
Ibid, 211 – 1 2.
Jean-Louis Pradel interview with Kader Attia in Kader Attia (JRP|Ringier: Letzigraben, 2006), 47.
Excerpted from Courtney J. Martin’s Empty and Full Against the Night Sky in Kader Attia: Signs of
Reappropriation (Savannah: Savannah College of Art and Design, 2009).
Kader Attia, Untitled (Skyline) installation view detail, ACA Gallery of SCAD, Atlanta, Georgia, 2008
Bibliography
A Brief Guide to the Dome of the Rock and Al-Haram Al-Sharif. Jerusalem: The Supreme AWQAF Council, 1962.
Dome of the Rock. New York: Newsweek Book Division, 1972.
Grabar, Oleg. The Dome of the Rock. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2006.
Farrell, Laurie Ann, ed. Kader Attia: Signs of Reappropriation. Savannah: The Savannah College of Art
and Design, 2009.
Kader Attia. Huarte-Navarra: Centro Huarte de Arte Contemporáneo, 2009.
Kader Attia. Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2007.
Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Washington DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2006.
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Kader Attia, Algeria
Laurie Ann Farrell, United States
Kader Attia was born in 1970 into an Algerian family in Paris. He studied both Philosophy
and Art in Paris. In 1993, he spent a year at Barcelona’s Escola de Artes Applicades.
He held his first solo exhibition in 1996 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and
since then has exhibited regularly throughout the world. Attia’s childhood between
France and Algeria, going back and forth between the Christian Occident, the Islamic
Maghreb and the Jewish-Algerian Sephardic world, has had a decisive impact on his
work. His time living in the Congo-Kinshasa, as well as Venezuela and Algeria, further
informs the multicultural vision in his work.
Laurie Ann Farrell is executive director of exhibitions for the Savannah College of
Art and Design (SCAD), which operates galleries in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia;
Lacoste, France; and Hong Kong. Recent exhibitions and special projects of note at
SCAD include Wild is the Wind (2010), Doug Aitken (2009), Nick Cave (2009), Cao Fei
+ Map Office NO LAB on Tour (2008 – 09), Kader Attia: Signs of Reappropriation (2008 – 09),
Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Odile and Odette (2008), Carrie Mae Weems Constructing History:
A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2008), Wangechi Mutu The Cinderella Curse (2007), and
Yeondoo Jung: I’ll Remember You (2007).
Using his own identities as the starting point, he tackles the increasingly difficult
relationship between Europe and immigrants, particularly those of Islamic faith. In
doing so he does not tie himself to one specific medium to explore controversial content.
Attia gained international recognition at the 50 th Venice Biennale (2003) and at the
Lyon Biennale (2005). At the latter he created Flying Rats, featuring life-size seed sculptures
like children being devoured by 250 pigeons. Other works include The Landing Strip, the
culmination of Attia’s work with Algerian transsexuals within wider French society.
From 1999 to 2007 Farrell was curator at the Museum for African Art in New York
City. Highlight exhibitions there include Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary
South African Art (2004), Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora (2003)
and Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa (1999). Her research for the past four
years has focused on artistic dialogues and contemporary art practices in North Africa
and the Middle East. In 2006 she organized the American participation at the inaugural
Trienal de Luanda.
In November 2007 he held his first solo exhibition in the USA, Momentum, at the
ICA Boston, and the large-scale New Works opened in February 2008 at the Henry Art
Gallery in Seattle. Other recent projects include solo shows such as Square Dreams at
the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle in 2007, and at the Centro
de Arte Contemporaneo in Huarte – Spain, and a residency at IASPIS – Sweden in
2008, participation in major exhibitions like La Force de l’Art / Paris Triennial and
Havana Biennale, and curating the exhibition Periferiks at Centre d’Art de Neuchâtel
in Switzerland in 2009. In 2010, Attia is taking part, among other projects, in the
Sydney Biennial and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Program.
Widely published in art journals, Farrell has lectured throughout the U.S. as well as in
Europe, Angola, South Africa and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Farrell earned a Master of
Arts degree in art history and theory from the University of Arizona and a Bachelor of
Arts degree in art history from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Hala Elkoussy
Curated by
Jelle Bouwhuis
Jelle Bouwhuis
Hala Elkoussy, Myths & Legends Room – The Mural, installation shot, Art Dubai, 2010
“Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them;
simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal
justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a
statement of fact.” — Roland Barthes 1
The myths and legends referred to by Hala Elkoussy’s Myths & Legends Room – The Mural
are not those of a distant past, but those of today. They are photographic tales based
on historical facts, rumors, religious beliefs, traditions and other myths and legends,
conjuring up narratives through which reality shimmers: the reality of life in Cairo, the
city that lies at the base of almost all of Elkoussy’s works. In the vast mural, measuring
three by nine meters, the presence of this reality is excessive, as if endeavoring to
achieve an archival completeness. Such an endeavor makes sense, given the fact that
the mural’s title suggests an imaginary chamber in a museum, the Myths & Legends
Room, for the Museum of the City of Cairo, that unfortunately doesn’t exist (and
whose non-existence was in fact the trigger for this project). The only way to get a
grip on the Mural, and admire its sheer abundance of detail, is to slowly scrutinize its
elements, put it into context, not only art-historically but also in the framework of
Elkoussy’s other work and, naturally, of life in Cairo.
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Hala Elkoussy, Myths & Legends Room – The Mural, 2010
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Hala Elkoussy, Myths & Legends Room – The Mural, detail, 2010
The Mural consists of 48 photographs measuring 75 x 75 cm. Their black frames are
assembled so as to form a large rectangular grid that is superimposed on the basic
compositional structure of the scenery. The composition is organized into three
horizontal levels. The upper level is characterized by its connection to the sky, featuring
a city skyline, the Cairo University Dome, Mokattam Hill, the ethereal apparition of
the Virgin Mary and more. The lower level is dominated by water (referring, of course,
to the Nile) and a pile of debris upon which stands the giant black figure who dominates
and balances the composition. On an iconographic level, one can discern a wall or
a room that is open to the sky, with scores of panels depicting all kinds of scenes floating
in it. Some motifs appear between or independent of the these panels, such as the
seven virgins holding a mirror in their hands ingeniously reflecting other parts of the
mural, the fires and smoke clouds to the left, the colorful banners toward the top or
the pile of plastic bottles toward the bottom, and so on.
colorful scale, bringing together custom-staged photographs as well as street photography,
old photographs, original drawings, illustrations and computer-generated graphics
and design. Such a compilation, and manipulation, of material can be seen in details
such as the stamp in the upper left corner of the Mural, based on a commemorative
stamp from 1961 that pictures Cairo Tower. Elkoussy subtly manipulated this image to
resemble a fist giving the middle finger with an acrobat perching on its top. Another
example, slightly lower down in the composition, is the pious man Saii Al Bahr from
the tenth century, believed to have cried enough to flood the banks of the Nile, depicted
here crying painted tears and standing before the street sign in Cairo that bears his
name. The mural also incorporates custom-made cartoon drawings by cartoonist
Walid Taher, such as those of a crowd protesting in the center of the image and street
children watching from the side.
This large mural exploits the ideas of photo-montage as it has been made ubiquitous
by the advertisement industry. 2 Elkoussy uses the montage principle on a massive and
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To better understand the Mural’s creative background, one could reference
commemorative wall paintings such as those in the National Military Museum in Cairo,
depicting various war scenes from Egypt’s history, the heroism of the military and its
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popular support. The Mural hints at this reference through the representation of a
scene from the October War Panorama, which celebrates Egypt’s 1973 victory over Israel.
In the Military Museum, the composition of some of these commemorative paintings is
hierarchically organized around the main protagonist, the military leader. In Elkoussy’s
Mural, this central figure, the Black Soldier, who sports a prosthetic cow leg and has
a fishing net as his sole weapon, is rather an anti-hero, inspired by a short story by the
Egyptian writer Youssef Idris dealing with state brutality in the pre-revolution era.
The mythical and the legendary in the Mural are not only specific events. They are
responses from within the highly complex entity that is the city – responses to the
overarching imposed state control and its means of propaganda, which penetrates the
media and the educational system, leaving no space for individual political expression
and thus resulting in political apathy, and constituting an ever-changing and constantly
self-stabilizing structure through the interests and belief systems of millions of
stressed individual inhabitants.
Indeed, as the largest city both on the African continent and in the Middle East, Cairo
puts a lot of pressure on its people. Its size is an outcome of its incessant growth in
the second half of the 20th century to accommodate the flow of migrants from the
countryside, who came to Cairo looking for better job prospects. This manifests itself
through the density of “informal housing” on the outskirts of the city: partially
unfinished housing units, built without permits and often lacking sanitation and legal
access to electricity. 3 Such dwellings are depicted in the upper left corner of the Mural,
where they obstruct a romantic view of the great pyramids of Giza (but instead reveal
an inverted Pizza Hut sign). A less visible element that fuels informal housing is upward
social mobility, starting with the desire to own a house in the first place, the supposed
end point of which are the numerous gated communities recently developed for and by
Cairo’s wealthy residents. The impulse toward social mobility contains the metropolis
in the pressure cooker and accelerates the modernisation of Cairo as it tries to connect
to Western standards of consumerism.
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Hala Elkoussy, Peripheral (and other stories), installation view, 2006
It is this social pressure and the strained housing situation that is the focus of one of
Elkoussy’s earlier works, Peripheral Stories (2005). Here, large photographic cityscapes
of suburban Cairo, presenting informal housing blocks and residential developments on the city outskirts such as Mokattam, as well as an enormous villa for one of
the more prosperous inhabitants, are combined with a 28-minute video that evokes
the constant sense of mobility, both social and physical, as it manifests itself in the
congested streets of Cairo. The fragmented stories that emerge in these peripheral stories
are re-imagined and recomposed from interviews, advertisement slogans, commercials, gossip and newspaper clippings, interpreted by a voice-over that suggests the
city’s craving for upward social-mobility, as well as its nostalgia for certain social and
religious traditions that have been left behind by the functioning of consumer culture
and mass media.
Since Peripheral Stories, the visualization of a vibrant social process in the metropolis
has undergone many formal developments in Elkoussy’s practice. Myths & Legends
Room – The Mural which can be described as a film in which each scene is frozen into a
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photograph, or even better, as a storyboard – is the latest of Elkoussy’s attempts to
capture a communicative memory in her work. A communicative memory is characterized by its preservation of simple everyday details in the form of stories that are
passed on from generation to generation over a time period that does not exceed 80
years, after which it transforms into cultural memory. 4 That is to say, when a specific
story survives more than three generations, it enters the sphere of culture. The
condensation of communicative memory in the Mural is an active intervention in this
slow selection process: it transforms today’s communicative memory directly into a
cultural one by turning it into an art object (which, in turn, even evokes a complete museum department). There’s something slightly contradictory about such an enterprise.
To describe this paradox, one could turn to Max Rodenbeck, who in his outstanding
monograph on Egypt’s capital, describes its “split between high and low voices.” 5
Rodenbeck situates this split firstly within the Arabic language itself, where one can
clearly distinguish between the classical Arabic of script and the colloquial Arabic of
speech – one universal but hardly spoken, the other customized to the vernacular dialects of regions and cities. 6 This split also manifests itself on the level of daily news by
the mass media, which since the revolution of 1952 have been kept firmly in the hands of
the government, versus day-to-day conversation in the streets, which has a lot of healthy
cynicism.
One could say that communicative memory is that which is understood by a certain
community, that which only has meaning within that community. An outsider might
see that the precise meaning of a certain story is restricted to a particular group, even
without understanding its content. And so the stories contained by the Mural, as they
emanate from the people, strike the average viewer as yet-unknown myths, awaiting
exploration and explanation.
An outsider is likely to need a key or some guide to describe the various events illustrated
by the Mural, if only to give an idea of the richness of sources of the work and its
intentions. For example, one scene in the lower right corner shows a re-enactment of
a found photograph from the early 1980s of a levitation act, which could have been
part of the celebration of a saint’s birthday involving big street festivals, including
music, small circus acts, games and food stalls. This type of itinerant small performance
is endangered because the current wave of religious fundamentalist thinking that is
cutting across all echelons of society perceives it as being in opposition to the true
spirit of Islam.
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To the far left of the Mural, a group of young pregnant women are posing happily
in front of a backdrop showing the tree of Matariya, also known as the tree of the
Virgin Mary. Women desiring to conceive commonly visit the shrines of saints and the
Tree of the Virgin to ask for a blessing. This practice contradicts a large sign on the
tree on which is written the slogan of a birth management campaign: “Small family
equals better life.” In Egypt, as elsewhere in the world, economic hardship pushes
people to use children as a way of alleviating poverty, thus adding to the rapidly
increasing population figures. To the right of this panel, hidden between some drawings
of household products that were produced by military factories after the revolution,
one can discern a scene of a young woman being tortured by policemen, based on
much-debated video footage posted on YouTube. Further to the middle, a collage of
black-and-white newspaper photographs refers to the great fire of Cairo of January
1952, which preceded the military coup of July that year. During this arson, a suspicious
number of foreign interests were targeted, forcing those foreigners to close their
shops and offices, and operate from temporary premises indicated on signs hung on
the shop windows.
It would be an understatement to say that there is a lot in the Mural. 7 It can be analyzed
through various thematic strata such as folklore and ritual, the references of which are
used both as a source of cultural pride and as signs of Cairo’s slightly fading
cosmopolitanism; tales of the super-natural, which are persistent no matter how the
metropolis; historical events between myth and fact, characterized by the depiction
of events whose official records are unknown or have simply remained unreleased by
the government; the voice of the state, which is usually confronted with an unofficial
version based on stories and rumours; and everyday life, which exerts the power that
fuels the unofficial histories.
Hala Elkoussy, on red nails, palm trees and other icons take 2, installation view, Sharjah Biennial, 2009
concerns a fictitious murder story in what used to be the densely populated and very
lively center of Los Angeles. That historical area became mythologized through its
appeal to the Hollywood film industry and mythified over the course of major urban
redevelopments from the 1960s onwards. 9 Like Elkoussy’s Mural, Klein’s project is a
way of memorializing a place in history not through the figures and facts handed down
from those who have the power to undertake such relentless projects, but through
the revival of dozens of small stories. However while both Raad and Klein rely on
documentary materials, Elkoussy mostly stages her photographs to present memory on
a physical level, like using stage sets as a mnemonic device. For all three, the use of
archival tropes serves to make historical information present and to order it, albeit
while selecting from instances of alternative knowledge or counter-memory. 10
Such classifications immediately clarify the Mural’s overwhelming if not obsessive
archival nature. This aspect – the immersion of the viewer in an illusion of institutional
completeness and authority – brings to mind the archival practices of other artists,
such as Walid Raad, who with the help of the Arab Image Foundation (est. 1996),
recovers all sorts of documents concerning the contemporary history of Lebanon and
recontextualizes them within an artistic practice known as The Atlas Group. In
particular, the project digs into the social complexities of Lebanon in relation to its
civil war. 8 Another archival practice worth mentioning is Bleeding Through by cultural
critic Norman Klein, a DVD-ROM project with photographic and filmic documentation,
interviews, gossip and press clippings combined with a short novel, all of which
Myths & Legends Room – The Mural specifically hints at an alternative itinerary for, or
détournement of, an archive in the form of a museum collection. 11 Elkoussy already practiced
such an itinerary for her commission for the Sharjah Biennial in 2009, entitled on red
nails, palm trees and other icons take 2. This installation is best described as a cabinet room
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with walls that are covered from floor to ceiling with framed photographs, some found
but most taken by the artist, together with moving images, in an “attempt to bring
together an imaginary space that stands in for the flux in the visual, cultural profile of
the city.” Elkoussy continues, “In addition to over 300 images there is a video element
that highlights certain activities that are on the verge of extinction.” 12 Like the Mural,
this installation was done without much hierarchy, resembling the jumbled-together
contents of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo rather than the heroic dramaturgy of the
Military Museum, albeit on a much smaller, more intimate scale that references a past
so recent that it still is alive as part of a communicative memory.
Yet the Mural is not without ideological content. If it does not criticize, it certainly
reckons with a certain state of affairs that sum up Cairo. The Mural itself deals with
the situation of museum and school education that turns into state propaganda if
modern history is at stake. Even more so, it offers an archive in response to the absence
of one, since access to Cairo’s records and documents is strictly limited. It also deals
with traditions that are vanishing, either because of the unstoppable processes of
modernization or the religious conservatism that has succeeded the cosmopolitanism
of the bygone era. Cairo is a city where the distribution of wealth is enormously uneven.
It hosts thousands of street children and slums on the one hand, and incredibly rich,
gated communities on the other. It is a city seen by its working class as “wicked and
wanton and possessed by others,” almost irrelevant to their lives except when it
intrudes in the guise of bureaucrats or the police. 13 But above all, the Mural pays
homage to a city that has been and still is the heart of contemporary culture in the
Arab world, absorbing and radiating its cultural wealth in the fields of literature,
film, television and the visual arts.
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5
6
7
8
9
Roland Barthes, “Myth Today” [1957] in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang), 143.
See for example Maud Levin et. al., exh. cat. Montage and Modern Life 1919 – 1 942 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
The nature of informal housing in Cairo, which is estimated to exceed 70% of the urban dwellings as a result of
dynamic social mobility processes and self-organization, is tersely described by Farha Ghannam, “Two Dreams
in a Global City: Class and Space in Urban Egypt,” in Andreas Huyssen (ed.), Other Cities, Other Worlds. Urbanizing
Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 267 – 2 89.
Jan Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedaechtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und Politische Identitaet in Fruehen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck
Verlag, 2007), as quoted by Dr. Hebba Sherif, “The video art of Hala Elkoussy – the Voice of the People / the
Voice of Authority,” Akhbar Al Adab, March 2010.
Max Rodenbeck, Cairo – The City Victorious (London: Picador, 1998), 312.
Ibid., 312 – 3 15.
Elkoussy’s guide to the Mural is 20 pages long.
See for example Walid Raad, Scratching on Things I Could Disavow. Some Essays from the Atlas Group Project
(Lisbon:Culturgest, 2007).
Norman Klein, Bleeding Through. Layers of Los Angeles 1920 – 1 986 (Karlsruhe: ZKM digital arts edition, 2003).
See also Klein’s The History of Forgetting. Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London:Verso, 1997).
10
For a brief summary of archival practices among artists, see Hal Foster, “(Dis)Egaged Art,” in M. Schavemaker
and M. Rakier (eds.), Right About Now. Art & Theory since the 1990s (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007), 72 – 8 6.
11
Although museums in Egypt are quite sophisticated on the level of content, this is certainly not the case when
it concerns modern history. For an overview of the more advanced museum practices in Egypt, see Wendy Doyon,
“The Poetics of Egyptian Museum Practice,” in British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan, 10 (2008): 1 – 3 7.
12
www.halaelkoussy.com
13
Max Rodenbeck, Cairo – The City Victorious (London: Picador), 1998), 298.
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Myths & Legends Room – The Mural comes out of a profound interest in the deeper layers
of a complex urban community. In the absence of a reliable record of its recent history,
it presents its own myth as fact, turning an insider’s experience into a magnificent
outsider’s view.
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Hala Elkoussy, Egypt
Jelle Bouwhuis, The Netherlands
Hala Elkoussy was born in Cairo in 1974. She studied at the American University in
Cairo (AUC) before completing an MA in Image and Communication at Goldsmiths
College, University of London. She lectured on photography in 2002 – 2003 at AUC.
In 2004, she co-founded the Contemporary Image Collective, an artist-run initiative
dedicated to the visual image based in Cairo. In 2006, she completed a two-year
residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, which is where
she had met curator Jelle Bouwhuis. Bouwhuis curated a solo show with Elkoussy at
Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam in 2006, entitled Peripheral (and other) stories.
Recently, Elkoussy’s work was exhibited in Goteborg Konsthall in Sweden, the 9th Sharjah
Biennial in the United Arab Emirates, Kunsternes Hus in Norway, The Townhouse
Gallery in Egypt and the Stedelijk Museum in The Netherlands. Elkoussy’s work delves
into the intimate and overlooked sides of communal living to highlight underlying
dynamics at play within the complex urban structure that is Cairo.
Jelle Bouwhuis was born in 1965 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. After working as an art
critic and writer, Bouwhuis became communications officer at Museum Boijmans
Van Beuningen Rotterdam and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam respectively.
Concurrently he held teacher positions at the Utrecht University and the Arnhem Art
Academy. At the Stedelijk Museum he became curator in 2006 where he is responsible
for the programme of exhibitions, publications, residencies and other activities of
Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA), a project space in the city center.
Bouwhuis is also a freelance writer, art critic and (co-)editor of various books such as
Sculpture in Rotterdam (2001); Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani – Blind Spots (2007); Now is the
Time – Art & Theory in the 21st Century (2009). His most recent publication is Monumentalism.
History and National Identity in Contemporary Art (2010) which accompanies the international
group show in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam with the same title.
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Marwan Sahmarani
Curated by
Mahita El Bacha Urieta and Marwan Sahmarani, Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2010
Marwan Sahmarani has always had a burning passion for seeing, observing, drawing,
painting and shaping forms and objects. Having started his career in communications,
design and media, he resisted an all-consuming artistic career for many years, not
identifying himself with the scene that surrounds artists and the recognized arts world.
Studying design and graphics in Paris allowed Sahmarani to develop his technique,
but this was not a completely satisfactory route for him. Eventually he left the school
and decided to find his own way. He moved to Canada where he threw himself wholeheartedly into painting, drawing and shaping his own style, generally dedicating
himself to working and living in his art practice. It was not long before his work
started to be noticed; soon it was embraced by gallerists and collectors in his native
Lebanon and across the Arab region, especially the Gulf. Today, there is still a certain
tension for Sahmarani between his need to step away from the art world and completely
dedicate himself to artistic production and the requirement to connect with the wider
arts scene, which some artists find uncomfortable. Sahmarani is always one to keep a
foot slightly in but stay out of the limelight. This is a survival mechanism for him to
safeguard his integrity, the authenticity of his work and the clarity of his motivations.
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Marwan Sahmarani, The Feast of the Damned, 2010
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not in the most productive manner. The institutions all essentially depend on a
particular reading of the region and rely on certain individuals, institutions and funding
bodies for their raison d’etre and survival. Sahmarani does not seem to need a seal of
approval from the art world to anchor him and his work in such a Middle Eastern
renaissance. Sahmarani is genuinely interested in investigating, experimenting and
working tirelessly and obsessively. His whole way of life revolves around his art, be it
working alone or collaborating with similarly engaged artists and individuals. This is
why it was a real pleasure to have the opportunity of collaborating with him – we are
similarly focused in our work.
Marwan Sahmarani and Hell: Fall of the Condemned Ones
Indeed his interests and the heart of his research focus on the art of the Renaissance,
Baroque and Modernist periods in painting and sculpture. These key moments in
the history of European art resonate with him far more than the gimmicks of a great
deal of contemporary art production. Sahmarani looks for a more personal engagement
and emotional investment in his work than many artists are able to do. The aesthetics,
themes and atmosphere of previous eras touch him deeply and, in some ways, one could
almost picture Sahmarani existing in the Baroque era. In many respects, Sahmarani
is unique in that he has the confidence and courage to deal with subjects not only
through drawing, painting and sculpture but also through film and performance. This
bridges a gap between a more visual-based type of production and the conceptual,
multi-media based work commonly favored by his peers, especially in Beirut. Thus,
his work has both dimensions.
There is a trend in a number of largely European and US institutions to label artists
within a recent movement of Arab or Middle Eastern artists – who often cut across
traditions and media. Admittedly, this brings recognition to art from the region but
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Hell: Fall of the Condemned Ones can be understood as a good representation of Sahmarani’s
thematic interests and aesthetic fancies in art. The Baroque aesthetic, the richness
and intensity of colors, the feast of emotions, themes and details present in this work
are evident. Its spiritual dimension, with direct religious references, and universal and
humane resonance interested Sahmarani. During the production of the work for the
Abraaj Capital Art Prize, Sahmarani was reading 19 th century French poet Beaudelaire
and Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy from 1300. He claimed that all the
protagonists of Dante’s imaginative and allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife
were with him in his studio when he was working, and actually played an active role in
the making of The Feast of the Damned.
Sahmarani was entirely dedicated to The Feast of the Damned. He did indeed travel to Hell,
Purgatory and Heaven during the making of this major work, and he wanted to
represent pictorially the soul’s journey towards God. It was a treat for him to have the
time and excuse to work continuously, intensely, without compromise and with total
devotion. He was in his element in his studio for hours and days on end until his
heart would tell him to rest his brushes and stylus – take himself out of his studio and
breathe some fresh air – only to be further inspired and come up with more ideas for
the work. The Abraaj Capital Art Prize gives funding and freedom to its winning artists who are trusted to spend as they see fit the generous $200,000 award. Still, one
thing was clear to Sahmarani from the start: “I want to work. I don’t care about the
money. This fund for me is an opportunity to work on a large scale, to work hard, to
draw, to paint, to perform, to film, to photograph, to install large and big, and I want
to use every penny to make all I can.”
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The Feast of the Damned; Beirut, 2009 – 2010
Our initial intention for The Feast of the Damned was to design and create a dedicated
space through collaborating with an architect, Beirut-based Pascal Tarabay. A three-way
dialogue about the creation of a chapel of sorts that would contain and at the same
time embody the work of Sahmarani: a space that would become a temple of human
passions, fire, emotions and intensity; a spiritual space for viewers to be immersed
in the themes and energies emanating from Sahmarani’s work. We wanted to create a
temple, and indeed we designed one that was simple and pure whilst being quite sharp
and modern in its shape and minimalism. The shell would be simple and the inside
would be dense and baroque. As is natural with every production process, we had to
compromise on several aspects of our initial concept in order to be able to fit into
specific exhibition venues. The diverse exhibition programme was welcome as it would
provide a great deal of exposure to our project. We ended up having to produce a
smaller and more generic space: a white cube which we then painted black.
Marwan Sahmarani, The Feast of the Damned, detail, 2010
There was nothing organic or spiritual about the space. When displayed on the interior ceiling of this black cube, the epic, large-scale oil painting which Sahmarani
produced for the interior dome of this project did not make as much of an impression
as the artist intended. It was hard for viewers to have enough distance from the painting, so it was impossible to view it in its entirety and comprehend the magnitude of
this epic oil painting and connecting all its diverse elements. Nevertheless the intensity
and rich colors of this multifaceted work stood with authority, and did convey to its
viewers the emotions and humane resonance with which Sahmarani charged it.
The Feast of the Damned at Art Dubai was, from the outside, a white box with the name of
the artist, curator and the title of the artwork. Once you entered, however, you were
suddenly in a very different type of space – somewhere dark, with large-scale watercolor
and china ink-drawings on the surrounding walls, energetic splashes of watercolor
engulfed you among intense themes of death, passion and disembodiment, flesh and
blood. Above, a large and complex oil painting heaved with beings of all natures and
elements that referred to known works by Goya, Picasso and others. Among the
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Marwan Sahmarani, The Feast of the Damned, detail, 2010
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protagonists of this giant oil painting, the artist himself is represented in self-portraits
looking at the viewers from among his fantastical animal-headed creatures, together
with elements symbolizing the act of painting, a brush and a palette. Sahmarani calls
us to connect to the work on a personal level, to spend time reflecting and to let the
feelings of horror and despair that The Feast of the Damned portrays enter the viewers’
hearts and minds and awaken their deepest fears. Death is the only certainty in human
life, and here in this work, the theme explodes and we are invited to redeem ourselves
to this fact.
The twelve drawings that hang on the walls between the ceiling painting and the floor
(6 x 1.40 m) depict otherworldly creatures with elephant heads that resemble Hindu
deities, skinned animals that embody both horror, and pure beauty and serenity.
Disfigured bodies hang on a tree as homage to the epic work of Francisco José de
Goya y Lucientes, The Disasters of War (1810 – 1820), which was also revisited by Jake and
Dinos Chapman in recent years. In Sahmarani’s drawings we can also see a giant bull
reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s works on the rituals of the Spanish bull fights – corrida
de toros – where again passion meets blood, beauty, violence and glory, all in the same
moment.
A few months after we were awarded the Abraaj Capital Art Prize, during our exchanges
about ideas for our project and its general direction, Sahmarani wrote to me: “In The
Feast of the Damned, I would like to get to the heart of the sublime – the way in which I
conceive the sublime here is in the context of the transgressive act of bringing together
death and life, beauty and violence, and representing the emergence of glory and of
the divine from the bosom of horror and terror.”
Sahmarani is also preoccupied by the political, social and cultural realities of the Arab
region and has often worked on themes such as dictators, massacres, disembodiment
and war. In The Feast of the Damned, there are several discreet and almost hidden
references to the region. Symbols, flags and culturally specific items of clothing can
be stumbled upon while revelling in the rich oil painting hanging on the ceiling of
Sahmarani’s temple in The Feast of the Damned: for example, a tarbouche and a woman
wearing a headscarf.
Marwan Sahmarani, Houroub of Aug 22 – 2 8, 2006
Curating a Painter – Our Collaboration
At the core of our artist-curator relationship were honesty, friendliness, freshness of
mind and openness combined with stubbornness and a strong commitment to the task
at hand. It was a pleasure and a new experience for me to work with an artist whom
I primarily conceive as a painter, for the role of a curator is naturally different with
a painter than artists who work in more conceptual media. The dialogue between an
artist and curator, when the work starts with an idea, is crucial in the early stages of
conceptualizing the project, so the curator’s role is more clearly defined. How does one
curate a painter? More importantly how does one curate the process of a commission
of a new art work by a painter, and how does one moderate the process of developing
the final presentation of the new painting(s)?
Part of the interest for me in working with Sahmarani on this project was the continual
dialogue about his process and vision, and how this often differed from mine. There
were some elements at the outset, throughout the process and in the end-product
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about which I was not completely convinced, but I decided to let go of my position
and let Sahmarani decide for himself where he wanted to go with his work. One example
of this is the inclusion of film and ceramics in the final work. Sahmarani was in
search of the Baroque, an aesthetic he likes, to which he relates and which he enjoys
recreating in his work. I, however, do not feel the same way. The project raised other
dilemmas for me: how did I feel about being judged as a curator on the merits of this
project, given that I was not at peace with some of the aesthetic of the final work?
The work produced in the end becomes a sort of middle ground concluding this
collaboration between artist and curator.
For an artist to be separated from his work after it is completed is one of the hardest
things to overcome. After the work was unveiled at Art Dubai, it went onto to form
part of the Abraaj Capital Art Collection. The relationship between a work of art and
the artist who produced it can be compared to that between parents and their children,
as told by the Lebanese poet, Khalil Gibran:
In Hell: Fall of the Condemned Ones, c. 1620 – 1630 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Bavaria)
the fearsome moment of God’s last judgment is depicted in an inimitable manner as
a whirlwind, sucking down a jumble of the bodies of the damned, human beings and
other creatures. At the moment of God’s final judgment, those found guilty are sent
to Hell – plunged towards their doom in a tornado of whirling bodies. At the lower
edges, a monk is pulled down, gnawed by demons. Above him, a woman is carried on
the back of a devil, his tail wrapped around her legs. At all angles, twisting and turning,
these souls stare up in terror at their terrible fates, or cover their heads in shame and
horror. Many artists have made their own interpretations and versions of Hell: Fall of
the Condemned Ones. There are contemporary paintings, photographs and even design
objects inspired by this epic work of art.
Baroque art dates from around 1600 and dominated the 17th century. It was a reaction
against the intricate and formulaic Mannerism that dominated the Late Renaissance
and which was the artistic style popular in the period following the High Renaissance.
It is considered to be a period of technical accomplishment but also of formulaic,
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
— Khalil Gibran, ‘On Children’, The Prophet, 1923
Once a work of art is produced, it no longer belongs to the artist; essentially, the
artwork then joins the world of the living and belongs to the world. I know that it was
hard for Sahmarani to be so intimately and intensely fused with The Feast of the Damned,
to then have to separate from the work. Such has to be the relationship of artists to
their works: fusion is often followed by separation.
About Rubens’ Hell: Fall of the Condemned Ones
The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens was the most renowned Northern European
artist of his day, and is now widely recognized as one of the foremost painters in
European art-history. He was the proponent of the Baroque style which emphasized
movement, color and sensuality. By completing the fusion of the realistic tradition of
Flemish painting with the imaginative freedom and classical themes of Italian Renaissance
painting, he fundamentally revitalized and redirected Northern European painting.
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Marwan Sahmarani, Funerary Urns, 2006
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theatrical and overly stylized work. By the late 16th century, there were several antiMannerist attempts to reinvigorate art with greater naturalism and emotion. Mannerism
was deemed cold and emotionally shallow. The Baroque aesthetic was less complex but
more realistic and emotionally loaded. The Catholic Church supported this artistic
movement and was its most important patron at that time. Baroque art was seen as a
return to tradition and spirituality.
While we were working on The Feast of the Damned, Sahmarani and I discussed a poem by
19 th century French poet Beaudelaire. Sahmarani felt that it expressed the emotions
and ideas with which he was engaging while painting and that he wanted to express in
the art work.
Hymn to Beauty
Did you fall from high heaven or surge from the abyss,
O Beauty? Your bright gaze, infernal and divine,
Confusedly pours out courage and cowardice,
Or love and crime. Therefore men liken you to wine.
Your eyes hold all the sunset and the dawn, you are
As rich in fragrances as a tempestuous night,
Your kisses are a philtre and your mouth a jar
Filling the child with valour and the man with fright.
Did the stars mould you or the pit’s obscurity?
You bring at random Paradise or Juggernaut.
Fate sniffs your skirts with a charmed dog’s servility;
You govern all and yet are answerable for naught.
Beauty, you walk on corpses of dead men you mock.
Among your store of gems, Horror is not the least;
Murder, amid the dearest trinkets of your stock,
Dances on your proud belly like a ruttish beast.
Candle, the transient moth flies dazzled to your light,
Crackles and flames and says: “Blessèd this fiery doom!”
The panting lover with his mistress in the night
Looks like a dying man caressing his own tomb.
Are you from heaven or hell, Beauty that we adore?
Who cares? A dreadful, huge, ingenuous monster, you!
So but your glance, your smile, your foot open a door
Upon an Infinite I love but never knew.
From Satan or from God? Who cares? Fierce or serene,
Who cares? Sister to sirens or to seraphim?
So but, dark fey, you shed your perfume, rhythm and sheen
To make the world less hideous and Timeless grim.
— Beaudelaire
Translation by Jacques LeClercq, Flowers of Evil
Mt Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1958
Marwan Sahmarani, Bacchanale, 2008
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Marwan Sahmarani, Lebanon
Mahita El Bacha Urieta, Spain / L ebanon
Marwan Sahmarani was born in Lebanon, and lives and works in Beirut. With an
archetypal biography specific to his generation, he left his birth city of Beirut in 1989,
and moved to Paris to study fine art. After a seven-year hiatus from the art world, he
has been in several group and solo exhibitions in Beirut, Dubai, Montreal, New York,
Mexico and Ireland. Sahmarani’s artwork is linked to his Middle Eastern origins. His
practice often makes historical references to art history and socio-political issues that
are very present in the Middle East but are inspired by themes that are timeless. In 2006,
Beirut’s Fadi Mogabgab Contemporary Art Gallery hosted a mid-career retrospective
of his works and a year later Dubai’s The Third Line invited him to show a series called
Can you teach me how to fight? He has more recently had a solo exhibition in London at
Selma Feriani Gallery.
Mahita El Bacha Urieta is a curator, producer and consultant on arts and culture
policy. She is also Founding co-Director of London-based arts agency Ziyarat and
is currently developing the cultural strategy of the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture
& Heritage in the UAE. She recently worked on museum projects in the UAE, including
the Saadiyat Island Cultural District. Prior to that, El Bacha Urieta was coordinator of the
7th and 8th editions of the Sharjah Biennial of Contemporary Arts in the UAE, also
consulting for the British Council International on matters of cultural development, the
Bergen Biennial, Norway and Casa Arabe, Madrid, Spain. Previously based in London,
she worked in music, art education, the visual arts and cross-cultural arts initiatives. Her
work included curating Arabise Me, multi-art-form, touring, pan-Arabic contemporary
arts festival, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, (2006); Bluecoat Art Centre,
Liverpool, UK – European Capital of Culture programme, (2008); Manifesta 6,
European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Nicosia, Cyprus (2005 – 2006); several
international exhibitions and projects including Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and
Shifting Landscapes, 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and Veil, New Art Gallery, Walsall;
Bluecoat Art Gallery & Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, Modern Art, Oxford (2003)
and Kulturehuset, Stockholm (2004). El Bacha Urieta co-produced several multi art
form festivals in the UK with Artsworldwide (1997 – 1999).
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Cities in Focus
Nadia Al Issa
The Years of the Underdogs and
their Establishment
Launch of Ashkal Alwan for Contemporary Arts and the Home Works Academy
“Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.”
— Captain Renault, Casablanca, 1942
Publications proliferate on contemporary Lebanese art including Tamáss: Contemporary
Arab Representations – Beirut / L ebanon 1 (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002), Out of Beirut
(Modern Art Oxford, 2006), Art Now in Lebanon (Darat al Funun, 2008), the summer
2007 issue of Art Journal and issue 108 of Parachute. These publications and in some cases,
the exhibitions that they accompany, look exclusively at Lebanese artistic production
in the post-war period, often as a singular and exceptional moment, focusing on a group
of artists referred to as the post-war generation. They form a hegemony in what has
been written recently on contemporary Lebanese art.
More recently, and especially during the past three years, a number of developments of
note have taken place in the contemporary art scene in Beirut. New trends in art practices,
institutional initiatives, and art history and historiography projects have emerged.
Marwa Arsanios, All About Acapulco, installation view, 2009 – 2 010
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While Marwan Sahmarani – having lived, studied and practiced abroad for many years
– does not fit into a clearly defined group of artists working in his native Lebanon, it
is nonetheless useful to consider the artistic context to which he is akin.
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Beyond the Usual Suspects
There is an often-told story of recent artistic production in Lebanon. In 1992, having
returned from the United States armed with a BFA, Ziad Abillama produced an installation
on a strip of beach to the north of Beirut that explored connections between warfare
and art. This triggered post-war art production in Lebanon as we know it. Gradually
the post-war generation formed. Artists of this generation, such as Walid Raad,
Akram Zaatari and Walid Sadek, are generally concerned with the impossibility of
representing wartime and its aftermath. Walid Raad, for instance, is well known for
the 15-year project The Atlas Group, which investigates contemporary Lebanese history
by both “locating” and “producing” artifacts. This blurs the boundaries between the
fictive and real to raise questions about memory, objectivity, representation, and the
document, especially as it pertains to violence. Akram Zaatari, on the other hand,
collects and presents real documents, testimonies and artifacts to shed light on conditions
in post-war Lebanon, on territorial conflicts and resistance ideologies as well as their
representation. Foregoing the image (found or produced) in favor of text, Walid Sadek’s
works poignantly consider life in a situation of ever-present war in “post-war” Lebanon.
There are, however, other less told or untold stories; an increasingly prominent one
is of a set of emerging artists who are also consumed by the war but in different ways.
These artists deal not so much with the war’s narratives and direct imprints as with the
popular culture and icons that proliferated in their playground – the city – during their
war-torn childhood and post-war adolescence. Members of this set include Vartan Avakian,
Raed Yassin and Marwa Arsanios, all of whom presented works at the most recent edition
of Home Works, a bi-annual forum on cultural practices organized by Ashkal Alwan.
Vartan Avakian’s work exhibits an obsession with mechanics and the process of production
and reproduction, especially as it relates to pop culture. Set in the late 1980s and early
1990s, the period of transition between war-torn and post-war Lebanon, Avakian’s
interactive pinball machine The Time of Heroes (2007) combines both these interests. Seen
through the eyes of a young boy reliving his civil war and early post-war memories, elements
from daily life at the time unfold into a surreal mechanical game of action film-like
scenarios. The Time of Heroes captures the feeling of helplessness experienced by Avakian
and others in Lebanon during this transition - a sensation of being flung like a pinball
between factional fighting one day and a new government’s declaration of its end another,
between the Cold War in one instance and the disintegration of the Soviet Union the
next - in a medium all too familiar to the artist from his youth – the pinball machine.
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Vartan Avakian, The Time of Heroes, detail, 2007
Artist and musician Raed Yassin employs images, music and text to explore popular
culture, Arab cinema and mass media. Often recycling found elements from pop history,
particularly of the 1980s, Yassin creates audio-visual collages that investigate the place
of popular culture in collective memory and the construction of identity. An extension
of the artist’s recycling practices, The Best of Sammy Clark (2008), features the pop sensation
of Lebanese origin, Sammy Clark, who also makes an appearance in Avakian’s pinball
machine. In this installation, Yassin elaborately stages a fictional relationship with
the wartime star whose shine was short-lived. The artist’s tongue-in-cheek glorification of
Clark and of his fantastical relationship to the singer explores the conventions of celebrity
and fandom as they relate to icons from the civil war era in Lebanon and nostalgia for it.
Marwa Arsanios’s interest lies in the history of the object and the narratives embedded
within it. For the past few years, Arsanios has been researching an intriguingly designed
architectural icon from the 1950s located in southern Beirut. The artist’s multi-stage
project explores the stories of the structure’s current residents – Palestinian refugees
who converted it into their home during the civil war – and the previous owners of the
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trendy Acapulco resort to which it belonged. All the while, she follows the changing
form of the space that frames them. Arsanios superimposes pre-war and wartime traces,
found while digging through post-war remains, with current realities to articulate a
multilayered history of a material object indicative of the history of the city.
Beyond the Ephemeral
Since the mid-1990s Ashkal Alwan has ushered in many of the major developments
in the contemporary art scene in Beirut. The association is now entering into a new
phase, launching Ashkal Alwan for Contemporary Arts and the Home Works Academy,
a venue dedicated to the production and exhibition of new work. The space will include a
multimedia library, exhibitions area, theater, performance hall and artists’ studios. Central
to its mission is to host a multidisciplinary educational program for emerging artists
and cultural practitioners, structured around workshops, seminars, master classes and
independent work. This program is unique to the country and the region as a whole.
Building on an already existing loose infrastructure of active institutions involved in
irregular or periodic projects, new institutions have now surfaced in Beirut. Existing
organizations have become institutionalized through their acquisition of “permanent”
spaces that allow for more regular programming, and efforts are being made by extant
institutions to establish wider avenues for interacting with the public.
A non-profit active since 1997, the Arab Image Foundation is soon to open a Research
Center, which will encompass extensive reference and video libraries, a residency
program, and regular public events such as lectures and workshops. The Research Center
will provide the foundation with a systematic means for engaging old and new audiences
and further stimulate dialogue about archival practices.
January 2009 saw the launch of Beirut Art Center, the first non-profit space dedicated
to contemporary visual arts in Lebanon. Of key significance are the regular opportunities
that the center provides the Lebanese public to access works by established local artists
who have exhibited widely abroad but in many cases never or rarely in Lebanon. Since
its opening, Beirut Art Center has organized a number of major first solo exhibitions
in Lebanon for Lebanese artists including Akram Zaatari and Walid Sadek. In 2010
solo shows are scheduled for Fouad El Khoury and Paola Yacoub. Another significant
addition to the art scene in Beirut is the center’s annual emerging artists’ exhibition
Exposure, which presents up-and-coming artists with a platform to exhibit their work
outside the restrictions of the commercial gallery circuit in Lebanon.
In 2009 as well, 98 weeks research project launched the 98 weeks project space. Similar to
a community center for artists, the venue, which includes an exhibition area and a reading
room with archives, is conceived as a space for thinking, meeting and exhibiting. As one of
the co-founders stresses, the incentive behind the acquisition of the venue was to make
available a fixed platform for artistic experimentation that is open to proposals in Beirut.
Walid Raad, Appendix XVIII: Plates 22 – 2 4: Lebanon’s National Pavilion – Venice (2007)(Plate 23), 2008
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Beyond the Required Reading
In response to the scarce literature on modern and contemporary Lebanese art, various
new initiatives have arisen in Beirut that are questioning accepted narratives of recent
Lebanese art history, shedding light on other possible understandings, and /or producing
resources – frequently in the form of archives – to enable further study.
Initiated by Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri, History of Arab Modernities in the Visual Arts is
a nascent research project that explores modern artistic production from the 1950s to the
1970s in 14 Arab countries, beginning with Lebanon. Rather than constructing this history
based solely on artists’ narratives, as often is the case, the project adopts a social historical
methodology that foregrounds the context by looking at the phenomenon of modernity
in Arab societies and the conditions that led to its emergence. It also attempts to understand
the shift from modernity to post-modernity, which is generally pictured as an abrupt break.
In response to the dearth of art resources from this period, the project will conduct
documented dialogues with contemporaneous cultural practitioners. In order to encourage
further research, video documentation of these dialogues will be accessible online.
produced during the civil war by 20 Lebanese artists such as Abdel Hamid Baalbaki,
Aref Rayess, Saloua Raouda Choucair and Fouad El Khoury, in media ranging
from painting and serigraphy to photography and sculpture, and included one
of the first installations created in Lebanon. The Road to Peace aimed to contest
narratives of Lebanese art history that claim a halt in artistic production during the
Lebanese civil war, or the absence of the subject of the war in art from that period.
The accompanying catalogue symbolically disrupted the narrative of the disconnect
between post-war art and art preceding it through the continuity it set up by inviting an
artist and writer of the post-war generation, Walid Sadek, to contribute an essay on
“The Impregnated Witness.”
These developments – artistic, institutional and art historical – are but a few
examples of the many more that must be accounted for in an accurate mapping of
the present art scene in Beirut and that are instrumental in predicting its possible
future form(s).
In 2007, Walid Raad launched the first chapter of his new art project, Scratching on Things I
Could Disavow: A History of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World / Part 1_Volume 1_Chapter 1
(Beirut: 1992 – 2 005). The project considers the physical infrastructure for art that is
developing in the Middle East, again beginning with Lebanon, and the political and
economic determinants that have shaped it. The project also probes into the material and
immaterial effects of warfare in the region on art and tradition, inspired by Jalal Toufic’s
writings on “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.” Raad critically engages
with visual art developments in the Arab world, including existing modern and contemporary
art narratives, questioning the structures that underlie them and give them meaning.
98 weeks research project is mapping out an initiative to collect cultural magazines
and journals from the Arab world, including Lebanon, from the 1950s to the present.
Periodicals of interest include the popular, mainstream Kitabi and Hilal, as well as the
more strictly fine arts-related Al Funoun Al Arabiyya and avant-garde Shi’ir. Launched
in 2010 with the Bidoun Library, this permanent fixture is developing into an
anthology of written cultural discourse in the modern and post-modern Arab world.
In 2009, Saleh Barakat curated a major exhibition at Beirut Art Center entitled
The Road to Peace: Paintings in Times of War, 1975 – 1 990. The exhibition featured works
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Nadia Al Issa graduated with a BA in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania,USA, in 2006. From
2006 to 2008, she headed the interpretation and learning programs at The Khalid Shoman Foundation – Darat
al Funun in Amman, Jordan. Al Issa has been Assistant to the Directors at Beirut Art Center since its establishment.
She is authoring a handbook on learning within the gallery context for art teachers and institutions in the Arab
world specific to works by contemporary Arab artists.
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Nadira Laggoune
Contemporary art in Algeria,
a changing scene
Kader Attia, Rochers Carrés, 2009
At first sight, it appears the local art scene in Algeria is dominated by traditional media
such as painting, and more rarely, sculpture. Even these traditional art forms can be
seen as relatively recent developments in the country’s history, but they fulfill expectations
of the public in terms of traditional iconography. Their recent popularity proves that
these practices, based on technical expertise in artistic production, continue to be
reproduced and commercialized through a tourist-driven, idealized market on both a
local and international level. Consequently, the artistic field evolves in an environment
where art is rather perceived as a “cultural image-object.” Globalization, however,
has modified the relationship between the West and the Maghreb and has introduced
new art forms, urging artists to reevaluate their relationship to the world, to themselves
and to others.
As a result of globalization, art is no longer confined to geographical boundaries.
Moreover, a south-south dialogue is developing alongside that of mainly public but
also private institutional support of artistic production on a local level. Since 2000
several significant events have taken place focusing on Algeria, such as The Year of
Algeria in France in 2003, Algiers 2007: Capital of Arab Culture and the 2 nd Pan
African Festival of Algiers 2009, which collectively awakened the Algerian artistic
scene. These occasions triggered the establishment of several institutions, namely the
Zineb Sidira, MiddleSea, 2008
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Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Algiers (MAMA), which has rapidly
become a hub for major cultural events. The organization has also provided a space
for new festivals, such as the 1st International Festival for Contemporary Art in
Algiers, Month of Photography as part of the International Festival of Photography,
among other exhibitions. These events exposed Algeria to the Arab, African and
European art scenes through the exhibition of artworks, curatorial interventions,
critical commentary and artistic response.
In response to a shortage of exhibition spaces, these institutions provided a platform
for artists working in Algeria to showcase their work. Algeria also witnessed the
emergence of new spaces, particularly libraries and literary cafés that were regular
haunts of publishers, journalists and intellectuals. They offered artists a social
atmosphere, suited especially for photographers that differed in their working patterns
and cultural stimuli. Sid Ahmed Semiane and Réda Zazoun are examples of young
photographers who took advantage of such opportunities, drawing themes from the city’s
daily life and producing photographs reminiscent of Medjkane or Zenati’s generation.
Products of multiculturalism are evident in Algeria’s shifting community made up of
traditions, practices, beliefs, languages, social, political and economic structures and
new technology. Artists who are now between 30 and 45 years old are the lifeblood
of the Algerian artistic scene, yet they assume a somewhat European dimension.
This is in part due to traditional affiliations, the “otherness” of the globalized
culture and power of the image. The surge in available artworks, by demand of
the art market (even if it is limited in the Maghreb and even more in Algeria), has
resulted in a reduced quality of artistic production. Many artists have succumbed
to misappropriation or alienation from their practice to be part of the market and
increase the availability of their works.
video, and above all, photography are the means used to transcend the simplifications
of language, visual effects or myths. Moreover, the current cultural climate has become
more complex, constantly challenging artists as to how to express their personal experience.
In her installations and graphics, Rachid Azdaou often explores the memory and
the presence of the dead. Fatima Chaafa highlights the fragility of human beings in
the face of the hazards of daily life while Sadek Rahim emphasizes the difficulties
of living in a world in crisis. It is clear that contemporary art, through subversive
means in this context, is gaining ground slowly but surely in the perceptual habits
and local consciousness. It is true that shocking or offensive artworks may suffer the
Paradoxically, this situation allows artists the opportunity for reassessment and to
therefore produce work distinguished by their unique regional perspective, as the
desire for visibility does not always suggest an artist will adjust their practice to market
demands. Artists find themselves in a position in which they must actively question
current issues such as politics, culture, society and ecology, as seen in the work of
Amar Bouras, Cyber Shehrazad and Amina Menia.
Young practitioners today include visual artists, photographers, filmmakers and
performers: a well connected, new generation that is succeeding in gaining recognition
across borders, in various institutions and tackling new subject matters. Installations,
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Amina Menia, Extra Muros (installation), 2005
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absence of substantial discourse or explanation, and a strong approach may be more
about instinct than concept. Certainly artists engaging in more complex discourse
are not in the majority, but the strength of contemporary Algerian art lies in the
viewer’s visceral relationship with the art object, thus elevating the importance of the
viewing experience above the principles of formalism. If the boom in photography,
followed closely by video and short films, provides an easy access to the image, it is
also indicative of a “culture of screens” and an interest in a medium which, by nature,
can only represent what exists: it is therefore the perfect medium from which to form
an existential expression of their relationship to the world. In recent years there
has been a tendency for artists living in Algeria and the Diaspora to draw new ideas
from both the past and present, combining current lifestyles and traditional habits
and rituals from the past. They are affected by foreign influence, new traditions that
emerged with globalization, prevalent current political events and economic troubles.
The issue of migration, for example, is explored by artists like Atef Berredjem in his
work Radeau de Lampéduse, as well as artists from the Diaspora despite their differing
perspectives, as illustrated by Zineb Sedira’s MiddleSea.
Artists feel anchored in the social, political and cultural domains in which they
find themselves but also draw upon the issue of identity. By force of circumstance,
the theme of identity will always be handled differently by each artist based on new
challenges they create for themselves. The guarantee of an artist’s originality and
contemporaneity is still related to their identity, not in the restrictive or traditional
sense but rather in what creates the individual and social experiences of an artist.
Thus, globalization and the shifting in the spheres of art have often encouraged artists
from the Diaspora to return to the country of their birth or that of their ancestors.
The frenetic coming and going of artist such as Kader Attia and Zineb Sedira
between Algeria and France has inspired new artworks, conveying a critical discourse
committed to the history of Algeria, the historical relationship between both their
countries and between the north and south. In his work Eat it, Mr Le Corbusier, Kader
Attia criticizes the appropriation of local vernacular forms by European architects;
in Kasbah, his vision extends further to embrace crucial questions relating to the
disappearance of specific, ancient urban structures and the desperate and futile
attempts to recover them. In his work Rochers Carrés, he further investigates a specific
localized occurrence, and by tackling such a present subject, he addresses notions of
time and exile, dream or reality, forced or deliberate but always offering a possible
response and a need to exist.
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Kader Attia has undeniably had a large affect on Algeria’s art community. His visits
bring a more considered and critical perspective, responding to everyday aesthetic
and intellectual debate. His influence will be further solidified upon the opening of
Art in Algiers, an art center formed in collaboration with Zineb Sedira in 2011. “The
art center Zineb and I will open in Algiers,” says Attia, “aims at allowing the Algerian
audience to see and discover artists from abroad, especially from what can be called
the ‘peripheries’: Latin America, Africa, India, China, etc. Even if the situation has
greatly improved with the opening of the MAMA and the creation of the Biennale of
Algiers (FIAC), the access to art is still very hard for the Algerian audience. We would
like to take the opportunities of our travels and the encounters we make to create a
dialogue between Algeria and other countries. As Claude Levi-Strauss wrote in one
of his books, ‘a culture can only improve if it is in contact with others.’” It promises
to be a successful partnership that will certainly bear its fruits, reflecting their
contribution to a growing contemporary art scene in Algeria.
Artists such as Attia and Sedira manage to transcend the narrow context of Algerianism,
Arabism and other definitions by confronting specific times and spaces. In doing so,
they expand their practices beyond the local and thus become universally relevant.
Nadira Laggoune is an art critic, curator and Teacher of History of the Contemporary Image, Aesthetics in
Contemporary Art at the High School of Art of Algiers. She was Director of Pedagogy at the High School of Fine Art.
Laggoune holds a law degree from University d’Alger, an MFA in Art Criticism from High Institut of Art in Kiev,
Ukraine, and a degree in Dramatic Arts from the Conservatoire d’ Alger.
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Sarah Rifky
Cairo, Art and the Politics
of the Spectacle
Hassan Khan, Decoy, 2007
Basim Magdy, The Great Retaliation, 2002
Postmodern artistic practices worldwide thrive on strategies of ( re ) appropriation.
Contemporary art in Cairo is no exception. Increasingly, and over the latter half of the
past century, cultural theorists have been flagging the warning signals of what has become
of society, in the stronghold of the spectacle. More recently, curators internationally
have been trying to capture the gist of the changing face of globalization in the era
of visual bonanza, instant-archives, and in the wake of decentralized media and the
self-generation of modern networks. Cairo has become a node in existing and newly
formed grids and systems, as well as continuing to stand in for Egypt’s historical legacy,
both actually and symbolically. The city continues to act as a regional spawning ground
for cultural production whilst contemporary art is straddled between producing, performing
and resisting the condition of the spectacle.
The resurgence of contemporary art in Egypt in the mid-1990s was as much the result
of local as global constituents of media, art and politics. International interest in the
region increased as centralized art markets thrived on the subsumption of the “new,” and
as the charge of political events conjugated the Middle East as a focal point of international
attention in the past decade. This has played a role in the production and circulation
of contemporary art from Cairo.
Iman Issa, Images of a Center, 2005
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89
Furthermore, the impending institutionalization of art, and the growing leverage of cities
in the United Arab Emirates mining on regional cultural capital – galvanized by art fairs
and museum franchises - also plays a role in shaping the future of art scenes like Cairo.
Delineating the local constituents that have contributed to this so-called resurgence and
the changes that evolved in Cairo’s art scene must be studied in light of the upsurge of
new institutions of art. In 1989, Egypt’s Ministry of Culture established the annual
Youth Salon, purporting its interest in providing international visibility for emerging
artists. The Salon, despite being criticized for deficient jury practices founded on a
contrived formalistic definition of art as contemporary, has acted as an evidential survey
platform for artistic production in Egypt. Although attempts towards a negotiation of
these structures, by means of including successful artists and curators from outside the
establishment in its affairs – most notably in 2009 – the Salon remains to be resilient
in its old ways, and dialogue between state, independent and artist-run institutions
is growing only incrementally. International cultural foundations and independent
initiatives, such as the Townhouse Gallery in 1998, the Contemporary Image Collective
in 2004 and the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum in 2005, have also played an
integral role in maintaining the ecosystem of the local art scene. These spaces, best
understood as substitute support structures for the arts, function as a landing strip for
international researchers and practitioners. They act as experimental cultural hubs in
addition to providing alternative, more democratic spaces for artistic discourse, and
finally have played a key role in dismantling the specter of cultural autocracy upheld by
the post-socialist old guard and classic, if not dated, overburdened art education systems.
Away from the stage of art institutional sets, the exhibition space is a requisite facet
towards a holistic understanding of Cairo’s art scene. It can be said that the exhibition
space imagines itself as an enclave of cultural production, thereby becoming a spectator;
in other words, a passive consumer of the contemporary artwork. It relies on spectacleaesthetics, with little concern for the artwork’s real socio-political function or tendency.
Such is the condition of many of the government run spaces in particular, their
exhibitions characterized by the plethoric display of works which are hailed for their
aesthetic quality – authentic and well-crafted with a contemporary flair. The more
“avant-garde” spaces, on the other hand, act as more creative hosts to their artists, thus
setting the grounds for new forms of cultural mediation to enter the public realm.
Alongside the slow evolution of the institution of art, the transformation of the status
of the image in contemporary culture from document to monument – as discussed by
Okwui Enwezor – has created another challenge for practicing artists, particularly
those dealing with lens-based media. The politics of the image are susceptible to the
politics of representation, allowing works to be re-read within exhibition frameworks
that tend towards the geo-thematic survey of the city of Cairo as a fixed subject. The
image, no longer temporal, risks becoming a stand-in for identification. Artists are
faced with the task of decoding the image and its political ramifications across the
conglomerate of ways of visual appropriation, production and reception. The artists
actively have to face the force of cultural discourse and canons of critique. The spectacle
is able to hold societies hostage in their entirety, rendering them to passive consumption.
In one of the world’s most historically over-represented cities, this condition has erected
itself as a source of inspiration or pole of resistance within contemporary practices, or
dissolving and tainting the artists’ everyday conditions of production. Although it is
never possible to step outside of this state, negotiating its parameters is necessary and
allows artists to invent new forms of engagement with their public.
As the spectacle predicates the mode in which artists’ work is received, both locally and
internationally, it has also led to variants in the way in which artists position themselves
and their work. Where do artists stage their work? And to what extent do they nurture
a passive mode of reception and fulfill audience expectations? Are artists able to produce
Wael Shawky, Telematch Suburb, 2008
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new forms of engagement with their public? Reading artworks as expressions, imagining
them in the totality of Cairo’s art scene as a text, it becomes clear that it is idiosyncratic;
there is no overbearing trend or unity to the artistic language and vocabulary adopted
by artists. On the one hand, the notion of spectacle informs the formal aesthetic, where
artists choose to reference the condition of spectacle – either through referencing
forms of cultural consumption and media (television culture for example), or through
the transformation of the visual image from document to monument. The impeding
challenge with which the work of art is then faced is that it is becoming trapped in the
realm of conclusion, becoming a fixed cultural performance. On the other hand,
other practices are able to reflect the performative force potentially imminent in artistic
processes and production, through introducing more playful, bold or provocative nuances
to the work of art, both within and outside the given institutional art space. These latter
types of work actively resist easy consumption, and tend to incite discussion and criticism,
forcing their public to reconsider the role and function of art and the means of engaging
with the artwork.
Consumption is also addressed within a spectrum of artistic practices. The stasis of
culture and image, as archive, also enters the realm of art as spectacle. Dealing with
a distillation of the logic of the spectacle, the notion of reception – art as the interjection
of the everyday realm and a space for institutional critique – still struggles to situate
itself within the local art scene. In part, this is because it requires the finding and
founding of a language that is reliant on contemporary critical writing, bridging the
gaps between contemporary producers and Egypt’s acclaimed intellectual history. The
rarity of instances that feature art as performative rather than performance, the work
of art as event rather than object of contemplation, and the power of the artwork as
gesture, signal to the voids and blind spots that need to be addressed in tandem with
the lack suffered within art criticism, education and curatorial practices in Cairo.
Discourse, knowledge and artistic production have all become equally commodified,
and even anti-consumption enters the commodification process and we are left with
no outside space from which to negotiate this position. The vocation of Cairo’s artists
is in crisis, as the traditional view of art as representation ceases to be enough, and the
demand on the artist as a public intellectual commands rigorous, real and continuous
inter-disciplinary critical engagement. Work of a solid disposition is expected to be
relationally specific to the nature of today’s conception of time, place and conditions
of production. The demands besetting the future of the artwork necessitate it to address
the institutional frameworks which allow it to exist, including what the conditions offer
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and what they lack. Artists’ ability to reinvent the forms of engagement with their public
hinges on a reaffirmation of the agency of the art work, not yielding to the demands
of its audience or towards its passive consumption.
The spectacle of an image and narrative-governed world, one which, as we speak, mines
on the intimacies of the community-as-commodity, reproduces an implicational parallel
in the attempt to offer a holistic survey of a city’s art scene. With Cairo, its art spaces
and society as spectacle, what lies ahead for its artists is commensurate with the living
conditions in a city unlikely to be accurately captured, a city in flux and transition,
daunted by political uncertainty, surveillance and control.
Extended Captions
Hassan Khan’s sculpture is part of the work Decoy which took place at Teatergrillen in Stockholm for the occasion
of the opening dinner of the exhibition Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie (2007) curated by Tirdad Zolghadr and Nav Haq.
Throughout the evening Khan speaks of the piece as a formal work, critiquing the notion of the spectacle. The
sculpture as an art object acts as a ‘decoy’ to the undercover plot loosely scripted by the artist for the occasion;
four performers carouse among the dinner guests as art world characters. The invisible performance is revealed to
the unsuspecting audience towards the meal’s last course, when the actors rise, assuming the sculpture as a stage,
they perform a turn, looking at the audience they step down, (re)turning to their unscripted selves. Decoy featured
in subsequent chapters of the exhibition Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie (2007 – 2009) as Decoy (Images and text panels,
2008). Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel.
Iman Issa, Images of a Center (2005), 5 minute single channel video, video still. Image courtesy of the artist. Issa
invents a character that describes a city which is never named. The video, composed of the narrator’s text and
public domain landscape images, emerges from the artists attempt to describe a personal relationship and a set of
observations of a familiar location, searching for an appropriate language – both textual and visual – to accomplish
this task. The utopist narrative and almost indistinguishable images gain resonance and specificity, through the
artist’s articulation of these elements in her work.
Basim Magdy, The Great Retaliation (2002), acrylic on canvas, 145 x 145cm. Image courtesy of the artist. Acutely
aware of the constructive nature of media images and the representations of conflict in television, Magdy enacts an
analysis of the images associated with war in his paintings produced while on residency in Switzerland. Relieving
the image of its temporality, the artist appropriates references from TV static, fixing his silhouetted subjects onto
canvas rendering them into formal visually appealing illustrations. The work’s title further recalls the spectacleallure of Hollywood battle blockbusters. Wael Shawky, Telematch Suburb (2008), 9.1 minute single channel video installation, video still. Image courtesy
of the artist. A post-pubescent heavy metal band gives a concert to a mass of rural inhabitants in a non-descript
field on the outskirts of Alexandria. The video, soundtrack removed, is accompanied by a droning sound, staging
both performers and spectators in an event, from which the artist has obliterated all traces of spectacle. The work
captures the undercurrents of the oddly comfortable mutual disinterest of both groups, disabling a reading of the
performance as a snapshot of determined, or projected, socio-cultural conflict.
Sarah Rifky is a curator and writer based in Cairo.
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Selection Committee &
Acknowledgements
Savita Apte is an Art Historian specializing in Modern and Contemporary South
Asian Art and has been actively involved in South Asian art since 1989. She holds
a postgraduate diploma in Asian Art and a Masters in Post War and Contemporary
Art. In 1995 she joined Sotheby’s as their consultant expert for Modern and
Contemporary South Asian Art, for their auctions in London and New York and was
instrumental in setting up the Sotheby’s Prize for contemporary Indian art. She is
a director of Art Dubai and Asal Partners and is on the advisory board of Sovereign
Art Foundation, and Bid and Hammer. Savita regularly lectures on South Asian
art history and the market at Sotheby’s Institute London and Singapore, SOAS and
Oxford University OUDCE and has two forthcoming publications on the subject.
She is currently a Ph.D candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London and lives in Hong Kong.
catalyst on the global art scene. Khadra has expanded the business to include contract
publishing, Canvas Folios, art and luxury consultancy, Canvas Education and
a creative art marketing agency. Furthermore, Khadra has participated in numerous
international conferences and panels on the topic of Middle Eastern art. A regional
consultant for Christie’s, Khadra is also a patron of Tate Modern and a member of
Tate’s recently formed Middle East North Africa Acquisitions Committee. He also
serves on the committees of several organizations in addition to the Abraaj Capital
Art Prize, he sits on the judging committee for Prix Pictet, the V&A’s Jameel Prize,
Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art and is the Chair of the Magic
of Persia Contemporary Art Prize. Khadra is now looking at the global art market and
aiming to bridge the gap between the arts and television with Canvas TV, a global arts
channel launching in 2011. A 24-hour network, Canvas TV will cover international
art, culture and lifestyle programmes. Khadra is an active advocate of philanthropy,
which he also applies on the corporate level through Canvas Holding’s activities.
Antonia Carver
John Martin
In August 2010, Antonia Carver was appointed as director of Art Dubai. She was
previously the director of Bidoun Projects and editor-at-large of Bidoun magazine;
recent projects include publishing an innovative two-part catalogue with the Sharjah
Art Foundation; running a course of critical writing workshops in Dubai; devising
and curating a series of artists’ commissions and exhibitions at Art Dubai 2010; and
launching the Bidoun Library. Known as a leading advocate of contemporary Middle
Eastern art, Antonia contributes regularly to exhibition catalogues, books, magazines
and newspapers on contemporary art and film in the region. She is a programming
consultant for the Dubai International Film Festival and the Edinburgh International
Film Festival, Scotland, specializing in Arab and Iranian film.
John Martin studied at Camberwell School of Art and Edinburgh University before
opening his gallery in London in 1992. He was co-founder of Art Dubai and fair
director for four years until 2010. He remains on the board of Art Dubai as well as
acting as advisor for other cultural organizations both in the Middle East and the UK. Savita Apte, Chair
Ali Khadra
A keen collector of contemporary art, Ali Khadra began his career in the hospitality
industry before turning his passion for art into a profession. In 2004 he founded
the boutique publishing house Mixed Media Publishing and launched its flagship
title, Canvas. As the premier magazine for art and culture from the Middle East and
Arab world, Canvas has received international acclaim and has established itself as a
96
Elaine W. Ng
Elaine W. Ng is publisher and editor of ArtAsiaPacific, the 17-year old journal
dedicated to contemporary art from Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East. Ms. Ng has
sat on the jury of the UNESCO Digital Arts Award 2003 at IAMAS, Gifu, Japan; Ars
Electronica’s Prix Ars (2004, 2005, 2007) in Linz, Austria; and the Abraaj Capital
Art Prize in Dubai, UAE (2008, 2009, 2010). Ms. Ng is also a contributing editor
to the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (MIT Press) and sits on the academic advisory
board of the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, the international committee for the
Abraaj Capital Art Prize and the advisory panel for Art HK.
97
Daniela da Prato
Daniela da Prato is the founder of F&A Financial and Art Advisory Services, a firm
based in Paris, specializing in the development and management of contemporary
art collections for private clients and the corporate sector, and promoting emerging
artists from the Middle East and Iran. A former investment banker, Daniela da Prato
began her career at CIC Paris and later joined LCF Rothschild to develop and run
the Bank’s international privatization and corporate finance activities. She holds a
BA in Finance and Economics from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, and is a
member of the Société des Amis du MNAM-Centre Pompidou.
Maya Rasamny Born in Lebanon, Maya Rasamny moved to Europe during the Lebanese Civil War.
She completed her academic career in the UK and went on to complete the Modern &
Contemporary Art course at Christie’s Education in London, and then completed an
Art History course. Together with her banker husband, Maya is an avid collector of
contemporary art and supports various not-for-profit art organizations in the UK and
the Middle East. Their collection is put together in order to reflect the global world
in which we live in today. The root of this diversity stems from her belief that art is an
international language not limited by national boundaries. Maya is the sitting co-Chair
of Tate’s Middle East and North Africa Acquisitions Committee (MENAAC), and is
also a Platinum Patron of Tate. She sits on the British Museum’s Middle East Acquisition
Committee and is a patron of the Contemporary Art Society, Parasol unit foundation
for contemporary art and is Exhibition Supporter of The Whitechapel Gallery. She is
also a founding supporter of the Home Works Academy in Lebanon, an academic and
educational program geared towards developing an interdisciplinary approach to arts
education in the Arab world. Maya currently resides in London with her family.
Frederic Sicre
Mr. Frederic Sicre has over 19 years of experience in global issues, regional
development agendas and community building. In the early 90’s, he established
the activities of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Africa and the Middle East.
He then managed the Forum’s Centre for Regional Strategies and was promoted
98
to WEF Managing Director in June 2000. As Managing Director at WEF, he was
responsible for the move of the 2002 Annual Meeting in Davos to New York City as
a sign of support to New Yorkers after 9 /11. In June 2003, he was responsible for
the Extraordinary Annual Meeting in Jordan following the Iraqi conflict. Mr. Sicre
has initiated dialogue and reconciliation initiatives during South Africa’s transition
to democracy and between Palestinians and Israelis. He has also initiated the first
Africa and Arab World Competitiveness reports. He oversaw the creation of the Arab
Business Council and is editor of South Africa at Ten – a book celebrating the ten years
of democracy in the country. Mr. Sicre brings a vast network of decision
makers from around the world in all fields of activity such as government, private
sector, media, and culture. Mr. Sicre holds an MBA from IMD, Switzerland, a
Bachelor of Arts and Sciences from Villanova University, Philadelphia and is a fellow
of Stanford University, Palo Alto. From 2002 to 2005 he served as a member of
the international advisory board of Scripps Medical Foundation, San Diego, USA.
Currently serves on the advisory board of Dubai Cares, a 1 bn USD endowment
dedicated to providing education to poor children around the world.
Lowery Stokes Sims
Lowery Stokes Sims is Curator at the Museum of Arts & Design where she co-curated
the inaugural exhibition, Second Lives, for MAD’s 2008 re-opening in its new space on
New York’s Columbus Circle. From 2000 – 2007 Sims served as executive director,
president and adjunct curator for the permanent collection at The Studio Museum in
Harlem. She was on the education and curatorial staff of The Metropolitan Museum
of Art from 1972 – 1999. A specialist in modern and contemporary art, Sims is
known for her particular expertise in the work of African, Latino, Native and Asian
American artists. Her work on the Afro-Cuban Chinese Surrealist artist Wifredo
Lam was published by the University of Texas Press in 2002. Among the many
exhibitions she organized at The Metropolitan Museum of Art were retrospectives
of the work of Stuart Davis (1991) and Richard Pousette-Dart (1997). Sims has
lectured internationally and guest curated exhibitions most recently at the National
Gallery, Kingston, Jamaica (2004), The Cleveland Museum of Art and the New
York Historical Society (2006). She served as general editor and essayist of the
catalogue for the National Museum of the American Indian’s 2008 retrospective
of Fritz Scholder. In 2003 – 04 Sims served on the jury for the memorial for the
World Trade Center and between 2004 and 2006 served as the chair of the Cultural
99
Institutions Group, a coalition of museums, zoos, botanical gardens and performing
organizations funded by the City of New York. Sims was a fellow at the Clark Art
Institute in spring 2007. In 2005 and 2006 she was Visiting Professor at Queens
College and Hunter College in New York City and in fall 2007 Visiting Scholar in the
Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Sims is on the board
of ArtTable, Inc., the Tiffany Foundation, Art Matters, Inc. and The Alliance of
Artists Communities.
Extended Captions p.14
Top: Kader Attia, Untitled 1, 2010
Pen on paper
Courtesy of the artist
Bottom: Kader Attia, Untitled 2, 2010
Pen on paper
Courtesy of the artist
p.16
The Old City of Jerusalem, including
the Dome of the Rock, as seen from the
Mount of Olives, 2009. Ryan Rodrick
Beile / Alamy
p.17, 27
Kader Attia, History of a Myth: The Small
Dome of the Rock installation view, Abraaj
Capital Art Prize, 2010. Max Milligan
p.18
Kader Attia, Untitled (Skyline) installation
view, ACA Gallery of SCAD, Atlanta,
Georgia, 2008. Photo by Dane Sponberg.
Courtesy of Kader Attia and SCAD Visual
Media Department
p.20
Top: Kader Attia, Normal City installation
view, ACA Gallery of SCAD, Atlanta,
Georgia, 2008. Photo by Dane Sponberg.
Media Department
Bottom: Kader Attia, Signs of Reappropriation
installation view, ACA Gallery of SCAD,
Atlanta, Georgia, 2008. Photo by Dane
Sponberg. Courtesy of Kader Attia and
SCAD Visual Media Department
101
p.22
Kader Attia, Signs of Reappropriation lecture
SCAD Trustees Theater, Savannah, Georgia,
2009. Photo by John McKinnon.
Media Department
p.23
Kader Attia, Sleeping from Memory,
installation view, ICA Boston, 2007.
Courtesy of Kader Attia
p.25
Kader Attia, Flying Rats installation views,
2005 Biennale de Lyon. Courtesy of
Kader Attia and private collection
p.26 / 27
Kader Attia, History of a Myth: The Small
Dome of the Rock installation view, Abraaj
Capital Art Prize, 2010. Photo by Laurie
Ann Farrell. Courtesy of Kader Attia
p.29
Kader Attia, Untitled (Skyline) installation
view detail, ACA Gallery of SCAD,
Atlanta, Georgia, 2008. Photo by Dane
Sponberg. Courtesy of Kader Attia and
SCAD Visual Media Department
p.34
Hala Elkoussy, Myths & Legends Room –
The Mural, installation shot, 2010,
Art Dubai 2010
p.38, 39, 40, 41, 45
Hala Elkoussy, Myths & Legends Room –
The Mural, detail, 2010, Art Dubai 2010
p.67
Marwan Sahmarani, Funerary Urn,
2006,Ceramic
Bottom: Zineb Sidira, MiddleSea, 2008.
Courtesy the artist and galerie
kamel mennour
p.42
Hala Elkoussy, Peripheral (and other stories),
installation shot, 2006.
Photograph by Willem Vermaase
p.68
Marwan Sahmarani, Bacchanale, 2008.
Ink on paper, 150 x 180 cm
p.85
Amina Menia, Extra Muros,
installation, 2005
p.74
Top: Launch of Ashkal Alwan for
Contemporary Arts and the Home Works
Academy during Home Works 5 on
April 22, 2010. Courtesy of Ashkal Alwan
p.88
Top: Hassan Khan, Decoy, 2007.
Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery
Chantal Crousel
p.47
Hala Elkoussy, on red nails, palm trees and
other icons take 2, installation view, Sharjah
Biennial, 2009. Commissioned by
Sharjah Biennial. Photograph by Plamen
Galabov. © Hala Elkoussy
p.54
Mahita El Bacha Urieta and Marwan
Sahmarani, Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2010
p.56, 57, 62
Marwan Sahmarani, The Feast of the Damned,
2010. Photograph by Sylvana Aza
p.58, 60, 61, 63
detail, Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2010.
Max Milligan
p.62
2010. Photograph by Sylvana Aza
p.65
Marwan Sahmarani, Houroub of Aug 22-28,
2006. Mixed media on paper, 150 x 200 cm
102
Bottom: Marwa Arsanios, All About
Acapulco, installation view, 2009 – 2010
Installation, Dimensions variable.
Courtesy of Houssam Mcheiemch
p.77
Vartan Avakian, The Time of Heroes, detail,
2007. Interactive pinball machine.
Courtesy of Reine Mahfouz
Middle: Basim Magdy, The Great Retaliation,
2002. Acrylic on canvas, 145 x 145cm
Bottom: Iman Issa, Images of a Center, 2005
5 minute single channel video, video still.
Image courtesy of the artist
p.90
Wael Shawky, Telematch Suburb, 2008
9.1 minute single channel video installation,
video still. Image courtesy of the artist
p.79
Walid Raad, Appendix XVIII: Plates 22 – 2 4:
Lebanon’s National Pavilion – Venice (2007)
(Plate 23), 2008. Archival inkjet print,
164 x 131.5 cm. Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler
Gallery, Beirut+Hamburg
p.82
Top: Kader Attia, Rochers Carrés, 2009
Photographic series, courtesy Sharjah Art
Foundation, UAE, and Galerie Christian
Nagel (Berlin & Cologne)
103
Colophon Editors
Laura Trelford
Curator of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize
Stephanie Sykes
Head of Communications, Art Dubai
Design
APFEL (A Practice for Everyday Life)
Printer
Oriental Press
The 2010 Abraaj Capital Art Prize would
like to thank all those who contributed
to its success, including all members
of the selection committee, Electra,
Hasenkamp, the Museum of Art & Design
as well as Zain Masud and Salma Tuqan
from Art Dubai.
104

14 - Abraaj Group Art Prize

Transcription

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