Cairo – Al Qahira – the city victorious, endearingly called Oum el Dunya (Mother of the World) by its inhabitants, with a population of over 20 million and rising, a dilapidated infrastructure, poverty-stricken slums and failing services, is a daily exercise in survival. Long-time resident of Cairo, the American writer Maria Golia, has written in her acclaimed book Cairo: City of Sand: »If cities are human experiments, then this one is a 1,400-year-old model of living together under extreme circumstances. Technique, not technology, is Cairo’s specialty.«¹ Egypt was, and still is to this date, the only Arab and African country with a permanent pavilion at the Venice Biennial’s Giardini. The country’s participation even won it a prize for best pavilion in 1995. Contrary to many neighboring countries, Egypt’s spending on culture is allegedly only exceeded by its defense budget. In addition, the participation of Egyptian artists in international events and festivals has significantly increased over the past decade. The names of Wael Shawky, Lara Baladi, Khaled Hafez, Hassan Khan, Hala El Koussy and Shady El Noshokaty must ring familiar.

Upon my first arrival in Cairo, I knew little of the rift between the government-sponsored art scene with its decrepit educational institutions and the so-called independent scene. The latter includes private galleries such as Mashrabiya Gallery (founded in 1982), Karim Francis Gallery (founded in 1995), The Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (founded in 1998), The Contemporary Image Collective (founded in 2004), and a slew of new initiatives which veer between the commercial – such as Al Masar Gallery – and the experimental, such as artist Moataz Nasser’s new space, Darb1718. Much has been written about the cultural momentum of the nineties, which energized the Cairene art scene with new venues and pushed a new generation of artists center stage. Not only the private actors functioned as catalysts, but the annual Youth Salon, instigated in 1989 by Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni – himself a painter and still in office – also offered a platform to emerging artists using »new« media (which in the state-run art academies were off limits) such as video and photography. Nevertheless, the Nitaq Festival (2000 and 2001), a joint effort between Mashrabiya Gallery, The Townhouse Gallery and Karim Francis Gallery, is often cited as a cornerstone event that shook the fundaments of the art world as Egyptians knew it (read: initiatives patronized by the State). What is telling, though, is that these narratives of the fragmented Cairene art scene are more often than not told by way of institutional protagonists, and rarely through the acts, visions or works of individual artists. The direction and flavor of the story will of course depend on who spins the yarn, to whom and to what end. Perhaps it is not surprising that in a country where civil society and active public life are as good as lacking due to a repressive political regime, »it is power that is usually the source of wealth.«² Eventually, the institutional, whether public or private, state museum or private gallery, is where power is encapsulated. In the case of the former it is not about the transformation of social and subjective realities,³ but rather about their preservation, and a perpetuation of an enforced status quo. In the case of the independent scene, competing for foreign funding and featuring a modus operandi that is often in opposition to the hegemony, a mentality of antagonism at times prevents the fostering of strategic alliances that would strengthen the cultural scene and the artistic community at large.

[b]A Tale of Many Cities: Grappling with Conceptions of Cairo[/b]
Instead of dwelling further on the various roles and battles of the respective institutions, I would like to focus on how artists living and working in Cairo position themselves within or vis-à-vis this context. How, for example, do they grapple with what is perhaps Cairo’s most ancient and heaviest institution: its past? Weighed down by an epic pharaonic history, and an equally epic dream of pan-Arab modernity and independence, personified by the republic’s charismatic second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, old Egyptian heritage was paired with the dream of a young republic. Add to this the fact that the standard imagery in the West when conjuring Cairo is a tattered postcard image of »the Orient«: pyramids, mummies, the river Nile, camels and bazaars. A more sophisticated projection might situate Cairo as a former major player in the Arab world – politically, culturally and intellectually. Yet all these references are in the past tense. Once again, Maria Golia aptly observes:

»Cairo is a city poised on the fulcrum of history and obliteration. [...] Cairo, with its relics of the past, and moving evidence of a more immediate and monumental survival, is an elaborate memento mori. It is a city of paradox because it lives on its ruins, these days so defiantly that people rebuild not for posterity, but as if to hasten decay, and so to build again.«⁴

What then is a contemporary articulation in and of this megalopolis at the turn of the 21st century? And how does this contemporariness resonate within artistic practice? Not only do artists suffer the burden of historical and national(ist) representation, but when engaging with the international art world they also face what Egyptian academic Dina Ramadan has called the »objectification of the artist.«⁵ Ramadan argues that the non-Western artist – in this case the Egyptian artist – is stripped of his/her individuality and is supposed to act as mouthpiece for »the collective« (the Arab, the Muslim, the Egyptian, the African, the Other), as well as having to straddle the representation of both »modernity« as well as »authenticity.« Recent exhibitions certainly prove her right. The exhibition titles speak for themselves: »Cairo Modern Art in Holland« (2001), »The Present Out of the Past Millennia / Contemporary Art in Egypt« (Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2007), »Fokus Ägypten: Past/Present« (Hildesheim, 2007), »Cairoscapes« (Berlin, 2008). A brilliant critique of the Western colonizing gaze is to be found in audio-visual artist Hassan Khan’s graphic project for the Swedish journal Site, »Read Fanon You Fuckingbastards.« With an intricate one-page graphic scheme he connects various cliché images of the Orient to other images, and addresses »the gaze that blinds.« Here again, the title says it all.

While Ramadan asserts that all fault lies with the orientalizing curatorial gaze of the West, self-aggrandizing orientalist imagery of the past has been the basic staple of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and the Egyptian contributions to the Venice Biennial. An artist who has made the politics of image-making the point of departure for her practice is Egyptian-Lebanese Lara Baladi. Originally a photographer, especially her early photo collages »Oum el Dounia« (Mother of the World, 2000) and »Sandouk el Dounia« (Box of the World, 2001) explode and implode systems of visual representation. Negatives of each other, the former is a counterpoise on conceptions of the desert as an empty space. Baladi has populated hers with a blend of fairytale characters, such as mermaids and Alice in Wonderland caterpillars lounging on the desert sands, and typical Egyptian references, such as the sphinx. Playful and fantastic, it is a powerful gesture of re-appropriation of orientalist imagery as well as of the Western imagination. »Sandouk el Dounia,« on the other hand, offers the dark and cramped confines of urban and technologized space. Here manga-like creatures populate an eroticized underworld; the dense visual clutter echoes the urban horrors of Cairo traffic and cramped living spaces. Baladi’s most recent project, »Borg el Amal« (Tower of Hope, 2008), earned her the Grand Nile Prize at the 11th Cairo Biennial earlier this year. In itself this signifies an interesting break with the past. As a first-time exhibitor in a state-run venture, Baladi has chosen to turn the social and political eyesores the government so desperately wants to conceal into her inhabited objet d’art. Inspired by the red brick informal architecture around Cairo, she has erected a 9-meter tower on the government-run Opera Grounds, the main venue of the Biennial. Housing a symphony based on Henryck Gorecki’s Symphony #3 (opus 36), and mixed with donkeys braying, the installation, or ephemeral construction as Baladi has termed it, turns one of the most reviled animals in Egypt and the housing of the poor into something beautiful, proud, compassionate and appropriate to show at a high-profile event such as an art biennial.

Photographer Maha Maamoun also plays on the reductive touristy images of Cairo in her photographic series »Domestic Tourism« (2005). Adhering to the conventions of the genre of postcard-perfect tourist photography, Maamoun adds a twist of her own. By choosing sites more accessible to the local population of Cairo, such as Tahrir Square or the feluccas (sailing boats) on the Nile, and digitally manipulating the image, she creates an eerie picture where something is definitely off. Appealing to our desire for easily consumable and digestible visual matter, Maamoun offers us something that is pretty and familiar, but only at first glance. Her cityscape of Cairo by night could have been taken from any rooftop, yet a closer look shows that all billboards, an omnipresent item and icon of throw-away consumerism, have been replaced by a close-up of president Hosni Mubarak’s lips. To Egyptians, the lips certainly will be recognizable, since portraits of the president are copious in the capital. In a city with probably the worst noise pollution in the world, Mubarak’s faint smile and silence lend a menacing air of surveillance and »big brother is watching you« sensibility.

[b]Fetishizing the Nostalgic and Symbolism[/b]
Hassan Khan has on numerous occasions⁶ deplored the resort to symbolism and nostalgia as cultural tropes within contemporary Egyptian art. Together with colleague and fellow artist Sherif el Azma, he has criticized what they have called the »fetishization of the vintage.« They see this gesture as self-orientalizing. There are indeed artists who play around with these codes, rooting their references in ancient Egypt, the folkloric and popular culture. This work – because it fulfills a certain mystique – does very well in the commercial Western art market and the big auction houses. The more interesting question to explore, however, is what the fetishization of what already constitutes a fetish (pharaonic iconography) actually means. For example, the work of painter and video artist Khaled Hafez is often described as »the art of dichotomies,«⁷ wherein he pulls together (tired) binaries of East/West, Man/Woman, Traditional/Contemporary, Ancient/Pop into large canvases. Working with the figures of the ancient Egyptian gods, such as Isis and Anubis, and likening them to present-day superheroes like Batman, Hafez’s work, which is typified by its seriality, is far more interesting to read as a comment on globalist consumer society than as an effort to hybridize cultural binaries. In effect, what is striking is the disposability of iconography, whether Egyptian divinities, American cartoon superheroes or alluring fashion ads. There is no authenticity to be found here, and thus the image becomes self-referential – a consumer good in itself – rather than »the profoundly continuous line of the human imaginary.«⁸ Hafez offers us the ultimate consumer desirable: superficial supermodels collaged with what has become the redundancy of the mysterious oriental old. In that sense he is far more contemporary than nostalgic.

In her mixed media installations and paintings, professor of Islamic and Arab cultural history Huda Lutfi works as an urban bricoleur. She pieces together everyday objects such as perfume bottles, dolls and junk found at the Souq el Gumaa (Friday flea market) with female iconography from Ancient Egypt, pop culture and Indian culture. Her work queries the position of women, gender roles and conceptions of femininity, yet in a fashion that is humorous and multi-layered. Her main protagonist is the famous Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, loved and venerated by Egyptians from all walks of life. While Umm Kulthum has often been interpreted as a nationalist symbol of the woman as nation, in Lutfi’s latest solo show, »Zan’it al-Sittat,« installed at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai, she presents Umm Kulthum as a figure of framed and restricted femininity. In her painting series »Suma Mother of Liberty« (2008), for example, the artist reproduces the face of the singer as the Statue of Liberty, yet she has her stand unsteadily on one elegantly clad high-heeled foot. Her »liberation,« so to speak, is unsteady at the base. Nostalgia? Perhaps, but the kind that is unattainable and flawed.

In a society where class divisions are stark and upward social mobility hampered by corruption and cronyism, artist Ayman Ramadan is the living example of breaking these taboos. His Cinderella story from Townhouse Gallery security guard to artist exhibiting at the Tate Modern and the New York New Museum has turned him into the darling of Western curators, and a success story for the Townhouse Gallery. His work has focused primarily on bringing the reality and routine of the Cairene working classes into the gallery. Projects such as »A Downtown Street« and »The Waiting Room« (2002), »Baladi Bus,« »Coffee Shop« and »Iftar« (2004) and »Koshary min Zamman« (2006) stress the invisibility, precariousness and the respective stagnation and frustration of an Egyptian demographic the government chooses to ignore. Ramadan’s projects are particularly meaningful within a local context. Exporting them risks the loss of criticality and a reduction to the mimetic and folkloric. His more recent work, such as his austere sculptural video installation »Hekaya« (2008), seems to depart slightly from this formula.

[b]Evacuating the Contemporary[/b]
So how can one speak of a contemporary moment without getting all tangled up in the weight of historical and national representation? The most effective and refreshing strategies are exemplified in the work of Tarek Zaki and Basim Magdy. Though both artists have very recently moved abroad, respectively to New York and Basel, their work has on a meta-level engaged with exactly the dominant discourses that make the grip of the epic on a contemporary and critical articulation so complicated. Though refraining from any direct Egyptian references in their work, their projects have dealt in playful and conceptual fashions with issues such as archaeology, authoritarianism, history, monumentality, militarism, heroism, the institutional, time and truth. They have deconstructed the latter by way of eradicating the linear pace of institutionalized history, and replaced it with something else. Tarek Zaki’s sculptural installation »Monument X« (2007) presents us with the remains of a fictive monument, its purpose, time and locale unknown. Cast in plaster and cement, the elements are carefully arranged as an exhibit. The pillars, stairs, arches and parts of statues offer us clues as to what once must have been, but no longer is. Zaki’s piece is all about the deconstruction of the monument as such – as art object, and as a symbol of a political and historic momentum. Its disintegration and open-ended interpretation suggest that, in an age of accelerated change, the idea of a sculptural and historical fixture is an archaic obsession that has become increasingly irrelevant.

Basim Magdy, on the other hand, catapults us into the world of absurd, sci-fi, fictitious civilizations and breached academic disciplines. Creating a sphere where fiction and reality meet, and where truth becomes a variable, he takes on the role of artist as trickster. His drawings, photographs and installations feature apes, astronauts, albino devils, planes, helicopters, aliens and military figures. Knowledge classification systems such as paleontology, geology and taxidermy function as playful building blocks for constructing futurist or atavistic epistemological relics. Truth value and fact verification are unimportant; it is knowledge that is power – any type of knowledge. In his installation »In the Grave of Intergalactic Utopia« (2006), a lone life-size astronaut is caged in a chicken coop, surrounded by a feeding bowl, fan, self-grown alfalfa, a water tank and a TV. The astronaut, emblematic hero of science and discovery, has been reduced to an animal we can gawk at. The absurd details make the whole scene even more confusing: tiny toy animals, peanuts strewn on the astronaut’s lap, plastic flies, and a mousehole in the cage, where a huge chunk of cheese is hidden. Magdy offers us a tableau where the temporal code is completely scrambled. In a later project, »Mud Pools and how we got ourselves to look for Bigfoot Heaven,« the artist bases the installation around a story of an obsolete high-tech Bigfoot civilization, its demise, and its subsequent discovery by human scientists. Magdy covered the whole gallery space with leaves and mulch. On the gallery wall the (hi)story of the rise and fall of Little Bigfoot and his mud-constructed city are retraced; in the center stands a camouflaged trailer with a Bigfoot figure, true identity unknown: is it a scientist in Bigfoot costume, or a real Bigfoot, or just a costume? As in his previous installations, the details of the fully furnished trailer add spice and confusion to the whole viewing experience: a pair of binoculars, a laid-out deck of cards, a piled-up ashtray, bottled water, microscopes and other objects for scientific fieldwork and survival. Once again, the question is put to us of how history – and whose history – is constructed and displayed. Is it the scientists’ or Bigfoot’s, or the artist’s? Magdy’s practice is ultimately one of fallen heroes and broken epics. Within the larger context of contemporary art in Egypt, Magdy’s main question, namely: »What makes the absurd believable, and how convincing should fiction be if it is to become part of our reality?« has never been more timely.⁹

The research for this article has been supported by a curatorial residency grant from The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.

 

 

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