I don’t know when this architecture tradition started, but I believe most of us are familiar with it. You enter a giant building, and at the entrance, you come across a glass box displaying the building’s scale model/maquette. You are inside the building, yet you are observing a miniature rendition of the building from above.
If you visited Las Vegas City Hall last month, at the entrance you would have stood in front of a full-scale maquette for a housing studio built out of cardboard on 160 sq ft. This maquette represents one of the weekly-rental studios that are spread all over the city. It may also remind you of the housing projects that the city and its civil society afford for the homeless. But when you get close, you will find a modest label with the artist’s name on it: Nima Abkenar.
The maquette/artworks invite you to enter. No doors to open. You walk into a small kitchen, a space intended for the bed, and a couple of squares allotted for the restroom. In the end, you are confronted by a wall with fluorescent lights hanging on it. Fluorescence is Nima’s fingerprint; we could spot it in most of his artworks, an aesthetic he took from his home city where fluorescent lights are widely used on mosques and shrines.
Outside of the city hall building, swarms of homeless and vagrants were taking over the streets, sleeping under the shade if they found it, or roving around in a circle that led nowhere.
I couldn’t separate the homeless situation in Las Vegas from Nima’s installation at the city hall, where people who work daily in the building are the ones who are responsible for finding a solution to this problem.
But this was my perception of an art project that has other layers and roots. Some of them go back to Nima himself, who arrived as an immigrant here only to end up revolting against the art school at UNLV and the Art Institutes of Las Vegas — although he lost and was spurned by them for several years. Now he was showing his work in the most official place in the city, revolting against the kitsch/cliché art that dominated Las Vegas’ public image for decades.
At the age of 16, I moved out of my parents’ house. I moved to 6th October City, all by myself, to be closer to university. I lived in a distant, working-class neighborhood where rent was cheap. There was nothing there but a small grocery shop and a filthy local diner throughout my first year. There was nothing and no one there.
It was the year 2001. The 6th of October was literally a “desert.”
If I remember well, one could drive for kilometers on end with nothing there on the right side of the road except for sand and dying plants. They would call it the Eighth District, but all I could see was a solitary district with no sign of life.
There were even no taxis in October, only light trucks, and you had to negotiate with the boys from Al Fayoum and Beni Souif, driving them to take you wherever you wanted. If there were more than two of us, the rest had to ride in the trunk.
Each morning, I would walk for almost 1.5 kilometers before reaching a spot where I could use the mass transportation means available in the city: a light truck covered with metal sheets and benches on both sides. If I remember well, the fare was half a pound.
My first days were dominated by a sense of isolation and the eternal repetition of a poetic nature. I went to university, came back to my apartment, took the food out of the fridge, and heated it, sat in my room thinking of ways to kill time.
I gazed out of the window or the balcony for hours without a glimpse of a single soul or movement. There was nothing there but parked cars and dim buildings. Most of the buildings there were uninhabited.
At the time, I was also reading “The Brothers Karamazov,” an unintentional and unconscious choice that triggered an extended episode of depression and sent me to a very dark place. At some point, I started doubting everything around me, so much that I started putting rocks around the parked car tires just to make sure that those cars were actually used and had owners who lived there. I needed to be confident they were real and not merely parts of a set décor for a nightmarish experiment that I was being subjected by hidden forces from up above or way down below.
I look back to those days now, and I see a mixture of nightmares of a teenager journeying through life on his own for the first time. A teenager who thought he was coming to live in Cairo, only to find himself stuck in what resembled a fetal city in creation: the far-from-Cairo Sixth of October City.
A painting from Amr exhibition
2
After two years of roaming through the isolated emptiness of Sixth of October City, I finally dared to head to Cairo – the Cairo I knew through art and literature, with its center, the “Downtown.” I didn’t know anyone there. I had no specific destination in mind. So, I roamed the streets alone, but that time I was content to be alone amongst crowded streets amidst people; that never happened in October. Sometimes, I sat on the pavement or stood in a corner watching the circus and the Downtown passersby’s captivating diversity.
Five years later, I went to an exhibition in “Ard Al Lewa'” which lies between October and Downtown, right between the city and its margins. The “Black dots 2008” exhibition was held in a tiny shop on a residential building’s ground floor. The shop walls were covered with wooden planks, on those planks, drawings of people in a state of motion. They were crossing the street or leaving a building, but here they were stuck in a void.
That was the first exhibition by “Amr El Kafrawy” for me to attend. We met for a short interview. He told me about his work approach: sitting in some “internet café” overlooking Talaat Harb square in the Downtown area, getting out a small camera while watching people, and secretly taking photographs of them. Afterward, he drew on those photographs to put them back in a state of motion. He turned them into black shadows crossing the empty wooden planks covering the “Artellewa” gallery walls.
Those shadows Amr created formed an old man walking around with a backpack on his bent back, two lovers whispering, and a woman struggling for balance carrying a heavy plastic bag in her right hand. You’d also see the famous Cairo street cats and weasels grown in size in a manner that would make you think of dinosaurs. People were parting from loved ones, friends meeting, people lost in the crowd, and an old man staring under his feet in astonishment.
As we talked, we drifted from the exhibition to the Cairo we loved despite everything – Cairo as we saw it; loud, crowded, and alive. Amr saw Cairo as a tense city full of life, people, and movement, and that tension is what pressures people until they become nothing but ever-shrinking black dots.
On the contrary, I, the village boy, was still thirsty for all that noise, tension, and mayhem. I still wanted a taste of every pleasure and pain there was to experience.
On the next day, I went to Amr’s working spot – that internet café. I rented a computer and sat there staring out of the window for an hour, paying no attention to the computer screen. As I watched the passersby, I noticed that no one was smiling; everybody was wearing their fatigued masks, or they were, in fact, sick. Those were the people of the city, supposedly. But they were all heading somewhere, just like in Amr’s drawings. And that was when it hit me for the first time: If all those people were passing by, then where exactly was the city? Is the city that place we reside and sleep in? Or is it what we cross to survive?
Amr with his paintings
3
I only got to know Cairo when it was on its deathbed. I’m talking about modern Cairo, which was redesigned and expanded throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cairo, which summed up all the different controversies, deformities, and achievements born from the attempts to create modern Egypt.
Cairo’s neighborhoods stretching over in proximity reflect the urban sprawl that took over Cairo for 200 years. And at the same time, they reflect the beliefs and dreams of the Egyptians who passed away.
It was that Cairo, “the city of a thousand minarets,” “The East wonder,” the city that woke up one day to the sounds of the stallions and cannons of the French pointed at his heart: Al Azhar mosque. Later on, the urban sprawl continued, and Cairo stretched over the swamps, allowing Downtown’s space to emerge. It was an architectural replication of western modernity. Downtown was designed to resemble Paris. It was planned for as the residential destination for the European colonial elite that came to rule Egypt. It was designed to become the new capital of modern Egypt, while they left ancient Cairo to rot on its deathbed. “Downtown” was the result of those attempts that continued for years. And afterward, in the twentieth century, the Effendi class multiplied in numbers. So the middle class carved out new urban areas, which was when the districts of Manyal, Abbasiyah, and Dokki first appeared.
And with the establishment of the military republic, the districts of Nasr City and Imbaba exploded into being. This random urban explosion continued until the nineties when the city was surrounded by an asphalt belt: The Ring Road.
The Ring Road is a witness to that experiment that continued for almost 7 years and ended with new cities ever trying to escape from Cairo’s tight grip without avail. Ironically, one of them was even given the name of “New Cairo” as if nothing comes after Cairo.
After the first decade of the new millennium, the authorities unofficially announced the death of Khedivial Cairo. The modernization plans and projects openly addressed a need to move the ministries and governmental bodies to 6thof October City, which was no longer the desert it used to be. Sixth of October City was then destined to become the new capital, but not for long. After the January 25 revolution, the compass changed, pointing towards the far East, and the New Administrative Capital project appeared. The New Capital is almost ready to be fully operational; it’s in the final phase. Once it’s ready, the old Cairo we know will be turned into nothing but a network of roads and bridges, leading only to the New Capital.
4
While Amr El Kafrawy was born in Cairo, I come from another city: Al Mansoura. I migrated to the outskirts of Cairo from Mansoura. And for 15 years, I had lived my life torn between 6of October and the heart of Cairo. El Kafrawy’s experience was the complete opposite of mine.
Amr had spent his childhood in Nasr City – a neighborhood that symbolizes Egypt’s republic like no other. From there, he moved to Downtown, where he used to live for years, chasing after his artistic passion. Downtown is the beating heart of the tense city that has influenced his artwork. An after years of living in the Downtown area, El Kafrawy finally moved to 6th October. Nevertheless, he still owns a small studio dedicated to working in Downtown.
Geographically speaking, El Kafrawy opted to distance himself from the city. And the tension, energy, and movement in his drawings turned into substantial, still buildings and ghosts from the past. The magic fades away with time, and the true nature of the city reveals itself. As time passes by, you discover that the city’s image and history only exist in your imagination, while the grotesque reality hits you right between the eyes.
5
El Kafrawy is not a documentary artist, and his works cannot be considered mere observations and notes on the city’s tension. His artwork is an extension of his long relationship with the city he deeply loves and is seriously involved with.
In 2014, El Kafrawy held his exhibition “Like a Mirage.” There was no one passing by the city this time; only the city’s buildings and ruins, and a vast archive of photographs he bought from an antique photo seller and recycled. He mixed the portraits that go back to the fifties and sixties of the past century with modern buildings’ photographs. He created faces of the city’s past residents roaming the remains of its present.
6
Art is only present off the road. Only copycats and “Kitsch” producers settle for images that highlight the sleeping beauty by the sidewalk. But art precipitates at the bottom and undergoes a long filtration process and purification of its primary materials. Amr begins his process with a photograph of a generic scene – he considers photography to be a medium that intensifies reality and isolates it from all stimulants. Copycats would take a photograph and re-draw it, showing off all the professional techniques of drawing and coloring, to produce a “Kitsch” photographs that gain a massive number of “Likes” yet are quickly forgotten the next day. Like El Kafrawy, an artist magnifies the photograph, adjusts, divides, prints and colors it, using a series of refinement, reformation, and experimental techniques. He continues in his process until he captures what’s hidden, even the absent or non-existent that would have never been there if it were not for the artist.
We see here not a portrait of Cairo or its buildings; it’s a portrait of what has no shape. It’s a portrait of that wound, that sadness, that indifference, and that suppressed anger boiling deep inside. It’s a portrait of the impact of Cairo and its Ring Road on our souls.
7
Nothing represents Cairo in the last twenty years, better than the Ring Road.
The city that had expanded over hundreds of years with no restriction has been enclosed by the Ring Road. Its residents moved to new cities and found themselves in the diaspora. Meanwhile, similar in manner to El Kafrawy’s drawings, the remains, and ruins of the city and the Ring Road stood still, overlooking each other.
8
The artist left again, heading to a new destination. This time he headed to a new country: to icy-cold Canada in the North where he currently lives. With a new look, Amr returns to his city, with a project that seems like a final kiss goodbye. Not to Cairo, but to a long artistic experiment that he indulged himself in together with the city: to an experiment that started from photography and printing, then drawing on wood, and ended with creating huge mosaic drawings using shadows and colors.
9
While El Kafrawy continues to use the same techniques in his artwork, this time, contrary to the “Like a Mirage” exhibition, there are no portraits of people from the fifties of the past century; there are no shadows of life in the drawings of this exhibition. He deliberately hid all life signs while he processed the photographs, during printing, and while drawing.
It is notable how the windows and balconies are dark in most of the drawings. There is no sign of life in these buildings. We cannot even tell if these buildings are complete or still under construction.
A considerable number of photographs, mostly taken on the Ring Road, acts as the central pillar of this project. Overlooking the Ring Road, random buildings stand erect on both sides, with nothing but red bricks. In the trench between them roadway, small pyramids of garbage are piled up all over the place to create a reflection of the cultural and aesthetic depth of the area. Most of these buildings and apartments are uninhabited; they are left there for when the sons of their owners grow up to get married or were built in a rush when the building materials were cheap. They are an investment for the future, which no one knows when it will come.
10
Everyone knows it, but it’s always important to remember: Cairo is only beautiful if you manage to escape it, and in El Kafrawy’s drawings.
Nowadays, I remember my first days in October. Dull, lonely, and terrifying as they were, I now catch myself reminiscing about them. No matter how brutal the past is, yearning for the past is part of being human. We yearn for the past and laugh at ourselves ironically for doing so. It’s very similar to that spontaneous smile that popped on my face when I gazed at Amr’s last drawings and noticed how the buildings’ red and pink colors deviate into grey shades in some drawings. How the trees and green scenery come together in others to create vague abstracts. How the tiny leaves come close to each other creates a gigantic network that ties the scene dimensions to one another. How round frames were used to give the drawings an iconic effect.
El Kafrawy’s attempt to turn the grotesqueness of Cairo’s architecture and its canned buildings into symmetric drawings is undeniable; he takes everything into consideration: ratios, balance, perspective, the relation between shadow and light, the relation between heaviness and lightness, and accurately calculated shades. His work is a reminder of the Renaissance Era’s landscape paintings, with a significant difference in the approach. Perhaps it’s because now that he lives far away from the city, he can yearn for it or search for the beauty buried in its remains.
Multimodality is not new to Egyptian culture whose ancient sign system was the hieroglyph (Lambeens & Pint 240); correspondingly, ancient Egyptian two dimensional mural art was at times sequential, illustrated by hieroglyphic inscriptions. Moreover, a bas-relief dating to the Old Kingdom circa 2,000 BCE at Cairo Museum may be considered as the earliest pictorial cartoon, according to Afaf L. Margot. It bears political insinuations by depicting a conflicting relationship between the keeper and the sacred baboons in his charge (Margot 3). Later, Coptic and medieval Arabic manuscripts combined text and image (Coptic Museum). In modern times, Egyptian cartoons evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century with the founding of newspapers in 1870. Their political humor was strongly connected to the growing antagonism against rulers (Margot 2).
2Children’s comics in Arabic flourished in Egypt as early as 1923 with Al-Awlad (Children), an eight–pages–long black and white newspaper, to be followed by Katkot (Chick) with serialized comic strips that have developed, ever since (Nadim Damluji 2016). The emergence of the first graphic novel by Magdy El Shafee met great obstacles for being considered by the authorities as “infringing upon public decency.” It was banned under article 178 of the Egyptian penal code criminalizing such publications. Author and publisher were put to trial and had to pay a EGP 5000 fine. It was translated into English by Chris Rossetti (2012), and later reappeared in new Arabic editions. Censorship was growing apace during the Mubarak era, and graphic novels employed text and image to flout conventions by exposing the authorities despite the censored environment.
3Graphic novels have gained popularity with the 2011 uprising in Egypt. More graphic novels have appeared since, such as Ahmad Nādī, Ganzeer, and Donia Maher’s The Apartment at Bab El Louk (2014), winner of a Mahmoud Kahil Award. Bab El Louk is a Cairo district close to Tahrir Square where the Egyptian uprising took place. During the uprising, Tahrir Square turned into a “carnivalesque” performance stage intermediating aural, verbal, visual, and digital, blending media and performance, most of which had political insinuations. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms this would be considered as “carnival” upturning social hierarchies. Tahrir Square became more of a mūlid (folk fair) location, where performances became similar to the Bakhtinian marketplace, combining “loud cursing” and “organized show… imbued with the same atmosphere of freedom, frankness, and familiarity” (Bakhtin 1984a 154), thus balancing social differences.
4The carnivalesque blending of media and performance, the pairing of (temporal) language and (spatial) image brings us back to Bakhtin’s theory which examines the utterance within the genre; this has been related by some critics to the combination of media. Gunther Kress has argued for a semiotic dimension of genre systems as combining varied activities within a medium. He starts off by proposing language as a multimodal medium (Kress 185), and all texts as multimodal (Kress 187). This multimodal approach to all texts or forms of communication shows that different modes have various potentials and limitations, and are articulated in specific ways in different cultures.
5In a similar argument, Lars Ellestrom propounds that all “‘texts’ and ‘systems’ overlap,” being parts of material, sensorial, spatiotemporal and semiotic aspects,” which he calls “the four ‘modalities’ of media.” Subsequently, “all forms of art, media, languages, communication and messages have some characteristics in common,” allowing them to merge without dissolving (Ellestrom 10). Mark Evan Nelson and Glynda Hull have noted that Bakhtin’s theory on the multimodal “chronotopes,” the time-space conjunctions (Bakhtin 1981), may be considered as precursors to the interpretation of multimodality merging multifarious potentials in media. They have concluded that synthesizing several theories in a study within this scope enables a better understanding of a multimodal novel ( Nelson and Hull 416-417). Multimodality has challenged the borders separating media and has opened new forms of cultural practices and analysis that cross borders. It has promoted new strategies for collective engagement in a mediated world, creating a space for cosmopolitan repercussions.
6Departing from traditional trends, experimental fiction proliferates in a cultural context where several forms of sign systems and media overlap. The carnivalesque environment referred to earlier that evolved with the Egyptian uprising has brought together creators from different social and cultural communities. Ahmed Naji’s (1985) and Ayman Al Zorkany’s (later Zorkany, 1982) Istikhdāmal-Hayãt (2014, Using Life) is a multimodal novel challenging borderlines dividing classical and contemporary verbal narratives, comic strips, popular music, and film-making. It moves freely between the classical and the popular, as well as between world and local cultures (later referred to as UL). The popular has acquired global dimensions with the spread of information technologies, science fiction, and cyberpunk sub-genres, even among subcultural groups living at the margins. Verbal and visual overlap, enticing the reader to meander visual, verbal and musical rapport, communicating thematic connections on multiple levels simultaneously. Indeed, as Ellstrom argues, “intermediality is a precondition for all mediality” (Ellestrom 4).
7By transgressing boundaries, verbal narrative and visual text contest plot-line consistency, as well as sequential chronology in graphics, which problematizes a critical reading of the novel within a single theoretical methodology. Any critical approach has to be shaped with relevance to the experimental nature of the creative work within its cultural context. Subsequently, I will draw from several critics that range, among others, from Mikhail Bakhtin, to Thierry Groensteen, Gunther Kress and Pascal Lefévere.
8Naji writes and Zorkany draws. Both are experimenting with mainstream novels and comics conventions, subverting the role of the Western superhero as well as the popular Egyptian arch-villain to articulate a futuristically fantasized estranged world. The objective of this paper is to explore strategies of engagement in UsingLife, a multimodal narrative, combining fiction, non-fiction, graphics and lyrics. It will trace modes of going beyond standardized formal conventions, breaking away with habitual reading protocols of classical Arabic and mainstream Egyptian fiction to create a culture of dissent. Besides the informal practice in the verbal text, of blurring boundaries among various language registers in Egyptian everyday spoken language, it merges professional and amateur writing. Correspondingly, Zorkany’s comic strips break with the artistic hierarchy set by the College of Fine Arts since its establishment in Cairo in 1908. Unlike the aestheticism of Fine Arts, comic strips hold an oppositional potential interrogating habitual modes of viewing. Furthermore, Zorkany drifted away from the drawing styles commonly used in Egyptian comic artists. His comics have a wider range of drawing/shading style, and panel composition.
9Naji and Zorkany have closely collaborated to synthesize verbal and visual; they have welcomed readers’ critical interaction, as acknowledged at the end of their book. In fact, the visual and verbal narrative strategies used, subvert the expectations of readers habituated to mainstream fiction, and graphic novels pandering to traditional tastes. They had to face the challenge of appealing to a wider and more varied audience, a multiplicity of cultural sources, and a wider range of artistic styles, ranging from cartoons, illustrations, and graffiti to commercial ads. The far reaching economic and social changes in Egypt as a consequence of globalization policies have formed a pluricultural society. This has unsettled mainstream culture and valued principles of all cultural groups. Verbal language has been affected mostly, and the visual took precedence with the spread of communication technologies. Subsequently, this has introduced new potentials for engagement with the world.
10A society that is constantly disoriented as a result of rapid changes effected by unknown sources is in constant need to relate. Moreover, the proliferation of the graphic novel as a multimodal form came in response to an urge to engage with the world through an immersive form. According to Kress, multimodality brings to our notice that perception is the result of the human body’s engagement with the world through the senses. The fact that the senses coordinate together “guarantees the multimodality of our semiotic world” (Kress 184). For Pascal Lefévre, the sensual is experienced through form: “The first and foremost dynamic process of form is engaging the feelings of the reader” (Lefévre 5). The fact that the body provides the means of engagement with the material world, would relate multimodality to “the issue of subjectivity” (Kress 187), and ways of its engagement with the world. Multimodality may be thought of as an epistemological tool invoking the reader’s interaction in order to rethink complex local global relations ensuing from the clash between global technological politics and parochialism in an uneven world. Today’s reader is a global and local citizen located at the crossroads of cultural encounters, and contemporary writers worldwide have become aware of limitations inflicted by traditional artistic forms, as well as the difficulty in relating to a single national culture. Subsequently, multimodal creative works worldwide are hardly confined to one literary or artistic tradition. Such is the case with Using Life (2014; later UL), the work under study.
11The novel’s title, Using Life is an appropriation from the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus’s (c.99 CE-c.55 CE) poem, The Nature of Things: De Rerum Natura, which is based on Epicurean philosophy. An epigraph appropriated from Lucretius is quoted in the book’s front-matter pages. The epigraph quoted in Arabic translates as follows: “Birth-giving reccurs on and on; life is not given for possession but for use” (UL 5). Naji’s appropriation of an ancient western classic, his merging of the local with the global, his mix of establishment with popular cultural products, and placing events in a contemporary setting endow the novel with a cosmopolitan context. The narrative events take place in cosmopolitan Cairo, configured as an unreal/real City that may represent the monetizing hurly-burly of any metropolitan city. However, the narrative subverts the call for “using life,” advocated by the book’s title and the Lucretian epigraph by failing to affirm them. Unlike Lucretius’s poem resplendent with natural imagery and sensuality promoting intellectual pleasure, the preponderant imagery in the novel is that of a yellowish desert, sometimes orange at its best, and that of a ravaged Cairo razed to the ground.
12As opposed to Lucretius’s birth-giving nature, the events in the novel are stirred into action by a geographical catastrophe—a devastating desert tsunami inundating Cairo under a sand avalanche, along with a deadly massive earthquake causing streets and bridges to break down, land and ground to fall down and eventually, the collapse of the pyramids; Cairo is immersed in an overwhelming agony, a bewildering pathos. The language used to describe the tsunami appropriates that of the sacred texts, with phrases like “the wrath of god” and “Heavenly damnation,” relating the overwhelming situation. Again, as in The Nature of Things, the element of chance—not divine intervention—is persistent, however, paradoxically, disabling the natural use of life.
1 * Editor’s note: the graphic’s allusion seems to be to David’s “The Death of Marat.” A reference to (…)
13The presence of death in life initiated in the verbal narrative, is visually configured by a graphic design in a two-page spread with a caption appropriated from the Natasha Atlas’s lyric: “You’re looking for paradise, while it surrounds you” (UL 12-13). Instead of an enchanting landscape illustrating the lyric’s words, the graphic drawing is of a devastated bathroom. The drawing is in shades of grey and a predominantly obscure background. Streaks of light emanating from an unknown source make visible a toilet, a tub overflowing with a bloody liquid, sharp-cutting metal tools, and female underwear negligently thrown.1 The prevalence of decay is heightened by the use of stark chiaroscuro. The contrast of light and deep shades adds a claustrophobic noir atmosphere. The image may be viewed from another perspective as, to use Thierry Groensteen’s terms, a “tabular surface,” for spatial relationships, (Groensteen 13). The contrast between the white typography placed at the top of the drawing and the black background heightens the contradictory relationship between the meaning of the lyric and the visual affect. The sharp contrasts in shades, along with the deformed non-representational objects, function as tools to immerse the viewer in apprehensive emotions (Fig. 1).
14Subsequently, the graphic spread cannot be viewed as a comic strip; the textual code emerging from the obscure space is deliberately disrupted by the gloomy environment evoked by the grey shades and sharp contrasts. The visual function of the typography becomes more active than the textual code in the lyric. The graphic drawing plays a double function: its placement at the beginning of the novel anticipates traumatic forthcoming events. However, once retrieved by memory along the flow of events, it impacts retrospectively, especially towards the end. The opening graphic spread disrupts the code transmitted by Natasha Atlas’s lyric, subverting the embedded meaning. The comic strips that follow are not set in consecutive order to create an alternative narrative; nor are they used as illustrations to the verbal texts. Conversely, they are as disconnected as the narrative text, at times supplementing the inarticulate in verbal language. The sparing snatches of dialogue in the subsequent strips are by an anonymous narrator, who even disappears from several sequences. Unlike classical comics that impose verbal on visual, the panels are generally self-sufficient, following what Groensteen propounds as a “poetics of reticence, ambiguity, and indeterminacy” (Groensteen 30).
The third verbal text following the graphic spread is an entry on Ibn ‘Arūs, a medieval Upper Egyptian folk singer who turned from his life as a bandit to become a popular lyricist upon being jilted at the age of sixty by the young girl he loved. Ibn ‘Arūs’s lyrics are sung to this day at local fairs, or festive occasions in Upper Egyptian villages, by Shawqī Qenawī, a contemporary popular ballad singer, also mentioned in the entry on Ibn ‘Arūs. The dates and national origins of Ibn ‘Arūs are not definitive, as the narrator claims that information descending from ancestors and exchanged among contemporaries is liable to constant modification along the ages. The insertion of this entry pseudo-documenting the lives of both popular singers ji lted by their lover[s] function as commentary on the previous episode recounting Bassam Bahgat’s—the protagonist narrator—disappointment as a result of his partner’s betrayal; parallel situations in the novel intensify elements of indeterminacy and chance. The multimodal use of text, graphic design and popular music to map related private agonies among members of different social communities, enhances the sensation of “tsunami” morbidity on the local horizon. The second chapter extends this morbidity to the international horizon with texts and graphics critical of private and public Western modes of living. Enhancing sensations by the use of three modalities of media–verbal, visual and aural–simultaneously immerses the reader-viewer in the narrative experience.
16Instead of a chronological plot-line, a series of episodes are spread along ten chapters, alternating verbal narrative, graphics or comic strips, as well as popular musical extracts. As verbal narrative visual comics and musical excerpts do not proceed in sequential order, they are mutually interruptive. Shifting visual, verbal and musical effects requires a pause, which disrupts narrative time and space. The verbal and visual are not attributed meaning in isolation, but relative to their occurrence in the text, and depend on the connections made in the process of reading. Multimodality or the use of multifarious media as referred earlier, coincides with the time-space “chronotopes,” hence merging different historical temporalities and diverse locations.
17The novel evolves through multiple temporality, and plurality of cultural narratives. Narratives from Cairo’s past and present are related, to provide a background for ongoing events in the protagonists’ private lives. In one of his interviews, Naji rightly opines that, “Cairo is a museum holding a plethora of historical buildings” (Ali 2014). Cairo residents daily commute along different phases of history marked by distinct architectural constructions and monuments, at times merging with shanty towns and popular districts. Past and present are active in the everyday life of ordinary Cairo inhabitants. Along with the presence of the historical past, the present has provided technological devices introducing parallel realities. Subsequently, events in the novel alternate inadvertently along the protagonists’ private lived time and simulated reality. Correspondingly, Cairo’s surviving monumental architectural constructions provide a cultural context of lived pasts, surrounding commuters, along with mediated pasts diffused through the media. Within the private domain, there are lived, recounted, dreamed and simulated times. By the same paradigm, Cairo is being lived as embodied space, and as virtual space. Inadvertent shifts in experiencing material and virtual realities in private and collective memory are one of the strategies used to destabilize progressivist ideologies. The shifts are prompted by environmental degeneration, social instability, abjection, and failed projects. Contingent cultural transformations make it difficult to mobilize a narrative of private or collective history on a single axis, which explains the plurality of cultural narratives on Cairo and of its inhabitants. These narratives are inserted in the action as comments on ongoing situations linking Cairo’s past history to present actualities, in the same way protagonists reflect on their past lives in present sociopolitical situations.
18Cairo has taken on several faces; the cityscape has undergone several changes under successive rulers. This is also configured in the changing roles of Egyptian women acting as traditional veiled women (Fig. 2) or unveiled modernized funky women (Fig. 3). These seeming binaries come along a series of graphic drawings. In a chapter titled, “The Animals of Cairo,” a variety of male and female figures are featured combining grotesque human and animal features; they are named: “the Scoundrel,” “Stray Dogs,” “Dervishes,” “cockroaches,” among others. Verbal and visual text subverts these stereotypes by revealing their complexity, making it difficult to stigmatize them under one appellation. They configure an identity crisis incapable of coping with new demands from the altered social and economic changes. Both veiled (UL 90) and unveiled women (UL 92) fail to find a balance between developing their distinctiveness while still fitting in. Unlike former graphics combining visual and verbal in one panel, in this series, the verbal and visual are split into different panels to be read and viewed separately.
19Identity in crisis is a consequence of the persistent tradition/modernity conflict predominating the history of Cairo’s architecture, cultural heritage, as well as social relations, and has been configured in different strips. This conflict has never been resolved either in Cairo’s urban planning, or in the lives of its residents. The tradition/modernity conflict is further developed towards the end of the novel; a sequential panel features a televised story of a worker at a printing press, who abandons his wife after becoming emotionally attached to the printing machine he works on, and fantasizes about having a sexual relationship with it (UL 156-161). It is a humorous strip with multiple cultural specific connotations. Most of the panels are in a grotesque style, merging reality with fantasy; they convey a visual metaphor, alluding to inability in managing technological advancement to meet habitual living, or difficulties in reconciling rationality and affect. It may read as a tragicomic sequence, which adds to the ambiguity of the situation instead of clarifying it.
20The disconnected segments configure a lurking catastrophe which the reader/viewer apprehends as early as the opening chapters, especially that the opening episodes, graphics and musical extracts manifest the end of Cairo, the sad finale, before starting the narrative leading to this end. The reader is gradually led to sense a double risk lurking in the urban, ecological and sociopolitical environments. While the sociopolitical and environmental conditions of Cairo predict an inevitable disaster, later configured as a sand tsunami, its geopolitics is being manipulated by an economic strategy planned by the International Architects Association. This multinational Association is planning to sweep off Cairo City to have it replaced by a New Cairo. Cairo has always been designed by successive rulers to become the center of power. Moving the center of power from historic Cairo to a “New Cairo” by an international association of architects is of significance. The Association is a “global player,” an “outsider” economic and a political actor and not the choice of local inhabitants. Its political activity beyond governmental control has increased the vulnerability of the system, which brings about Cairo’s devastated condition. The latest previewed transformation by the Architectural Association claiming to have worked with reference to stored archived material lacks solid credentials, and their work turns out to be drawing a virtual map of New Cairo, a map that, “precedes the territory–precession of simulacra–that engenders the territory […]” (Baudrillard, from “The Precession of Simulacra,” 1981). Environmental degeneration and globalizing capitalism work concurrently. Towards the closure, global capitalism overlaps with crime increasing the threat, which is marked by a series of mishaps. Inadvertent events occur, such as the mysterious disappearance of Maud, one of the protagonists, the discovery of traces of a crime in the Association underground offices, and the frozen human flesh discovered by Bassam in Moonie Moon’s refrigerator. The horrendous verbal images recuperate the prelude graphic spread featuring a tub floating with a bloody liquid in an abandoned bathroom. On one level, the closing events relate to the queries raised by the opening spread; on another level they raise additional questions as to the identity of the assassins and their intentions; together these reiterate the limitations of verbal and visual language to be fully articulate. The ambiguity of both verbal and visual languages, their inability to articulate a consistent plot-line configures Cairo’s devastated condition as well as the chaotic condition of its inhabitants.
From Using Life @ Zorkany
21The speculative architectural project of New Cairo undertaken by the International Architects Association, created in response to a capitalist transnational scheme, intertwines with the fictional narrative (Plesch 145) recounting the interment of Cairo as a consequence of a devastating sand tsunami. The environmental disorder configures degenerating social relations, chaotic governmental policies and lack of governance. The verbal and architectural narratives critique centralized planning, cultural globalization, digitalization and monetization. This is rendered in the third sequential panel (Chapter 3), featuring Bahgat’s first encounter with two members of the International Architects Association, who commission him to make a film on Cairo’s architecture (UL 37-41). The different postures of standing outsider and seated insider, commissioner and commissioned, self-assuredness and incertitude are rendered by focusing on posture and facial expressions. While Bassam’s posture conveys helplessness, his eyes reveal anxiety and negative affect (Fig. 4). Conversely, the Association members’ blank eyes shaped in straight, circular and interwoven lines convey a tunnel vision (Fig. 5). This blank look creates a gap revealing the complexity of the relationship, whereby one party’s inner emotions remains ambiguous; in that sense the images become performative as they immerse readers in the action.
22The presence of Ihab Hassan (1925-2015), the U.S.-American-Egyptian postmodernist critic, as a member of the International Architects Association is an implicit subversion of the postmodernism Hassan advocates. The construction of a New Cairo according to a simulated map designed by an international association, is totally divorced from Cairo’s cultural history, and marks the failure of a postmodernist approach claiming its inclusiveness of cultural difference. Conversely, Bassam Bahgat, protagonist-narrator and his friends, contest the Association’s rationalized globalizing scheme by leading the life of the flaneur. This mode of living also challenges the popular—turned—elitist postmodernist approach which had initially subverted rationalized modernization, but has later turned into theorization. The turn from live experience in an old Cairo throbbing with life, to the theorization and simulation of a “New Cairo” that replaces the old impedes the natural process of living. Subsequently, this explains Cairo’s eventual devastation by an unprecedented sand tsunami.
23However, the life of the flaneur does not promote the natural process of living either. Frustration with the flaneur’s mode of living is rendered in the fourth comic strip (UL 71-78), configuring the impact of hasheesh on Bassam, the protagonist-narrator in the spatial graphic mode. Bassam is rendered in a condition of temporary amnesia that dissociates him from material reality, carries him afloat a paper boat sailing on a sea of dreams. The journey proceeds along downfalls and lifts, sinking in the sea, and flying in an air balloon, until he finally lands on a desolate location. The strip is made of a series of single images most of which are without captions, or with onomatopoeic sounds like the “crack” of the collapsing paper boat (Fig. 6). One does not view the panels in terms of before and after; the reader draws the meaning by reconstructing a simultaneous relationship connecting different images. Bassam’s distraught condition materializes with the sudden appearance of an unknown person giving him back his lost purse. Instead of thanking him, Bassam resents the stranger’s help, and responds with abusive language. Bassam subverts the superhero image; his life as flaneur indulges him in half- accomplished pleasures. However, his indulgences cannot be classified as negative affect, as they are among the few choices offered in a censored environment.
24The Bassam Bahgat-Ihab Hassan dis/alliance renders the paradoxical relationship dis/ connecting dissenting intellectuals from the masses. Hassan’s presence is reminiscent of similar politico-cultural circumstances that have, with variation, previously taken place in Cairo’s history. Ihab Hassan emigrated to the United States in 1946, when Cairo was metamorphosed by Khedive Ismail to become “part of Europe,” engendering a cosmopolitan cultural environment. These were times when Egyptian Surrealists were at the peak of their performance; while closely connected to the International Surrealist movement, Egyptian Surrealists failed to achieve some of their aspirations in a cultural climate torn between modernists and conservatives (Kane 10-12). Similarly, Hassan, the postmodernist critic, while fully integrated into the American culture was totally divorced from the local culture to which he was related by birth. Most contemporary subversive youth movements as of the 1970s have appropriated the Egyptian Surrealists’ modes of contesting the establishment. However, Naji and Zorkany push “degenerate” or “decadent” art a bit further. Naji’s use of explicit language that almost verges on porno, his challenging description of sexual and gender relationships contest the growing social bigotry. Consequently, he has been unjustly persecuted and had to spend two years in jail in retribution (Koerber 2016). Ironically, this has increased the sales of the novel to over two million copies, a sign of wide reception, and the success of his strategy to debunk political repression and social inhibitions. The political establishment’s unequal war against Naji’s “decadent” fiction has contributed to the revival of political awareness, and augmented public resentment. Jacques Rancière defines “policing” not as “disciplining” of bodies” rather as a rule governing their appearing.” Conversely, Rancière argues that, “politics […] is antagonistic to policing.” “Politics runs up against the police everywhere” (Rancière 29, 30).
25The subversion of formal genre conventions of the realistic novel, such as the absence of chronological temporality, of superheroes, of a conclusive message, as well as the lack of explicit language frustrates the habitual expectations of mainstream Arabic novel readers. In the same vein, Zorkany’s subversion of formal comics conventions–the want of interpretive aids, the grotesque morbidity of his hybrid figures, unidentified mysterious location, heightened mood of existential estrangement in the fictional narrative–dramatically diverges his work from the commercial comics tradition. Furthermore, instead if using one style throughout, Zorkany experiments with a wide range of graphic styles. His comics production combines sequences of abstract drawings, as in the “You are looking for paradise,” panel and drawings with figurative elements, which do not form a coherent narrative. Thierry Groensteen calls this graphic mode: “infranarrative comics” (Groensteen 10). In addition to the absence of a sequence linking the panels, occasionally, the panels and plot-line are not logically related. These visual strategies disorient the reader and make it difficult to infer a single interpretation, opening multiple semiotic possibilities.
26Although the final strip (Chapter 9) is sequential, it requires decoding the various layers of signification. It is a parody of horror comics, critical of Western assumed power based on technological advancement; simultaneously, the panels ironically convey the vulnerability of folk heroism. The strip configures an invasion by monstrous figures spurred on by Paprika and Madame Dawlat, both Architects Association members, along with the escape of the perpetrators who may belong to the Architects Association members. The monstrous unidentified figures in the strip are drawn in a “rhizomatic style” in contrast to Paprika (Fig. 7). Paprika is drawn in a dynamic line whereas the hooded figures appear as a sprouting rhizome. Bassam and Hassan are identified in the panels in the act of invoking forces of resistance; in a diagonal layout, Hassan uses a spray can to fend off the monster’s assault, and is seen in the act of escaping with a bag. Conversely, Bassam is the only one to stand his stead, while he scares the assaulters by the use of explicit language–Hassan arms himself with technology, while Bassam relies on his innate forces (Fig. 9). The friction between two styles of drawing gives it a vital agility (UL 215-224).
27The protagonists’ figures are not represented in the same way all through; although they are recognizable they remain unrealistic. Drawings figuring Ihab Hassan have undergone an erasure (Fig. 8); Zorkany has previously caricatured “Ihab Hassan,” the postmodernist icon, as an aristocratic snob (UL 116). In the final strip (UL 222), Hassan appears holding a spray can–lower left panel–to scare off the monstrous figures. The image comes with a caption that translates into English as, “God has deemed this to be fair” ( Fig. 10). The word “fair” in Arabic translates as “hassan,” the surname of the American critic, posturing as one of the protagonists in the novel. This caption, which is appropriated from a sacred text, may serve as a commentary on the whole situation, expressing satisfaction with the break in the Association’s bond, and considering it as a blessed supernatural intervention.
The final comics strip disrupts the reader’s expectations of knowing the victor in the fantastic/real battle featured, and the strip sequence ends with no resolution. An unidentified monstrous figure sits blowing arrows; his crane reveals a conspiratorial scheme aiming at the destruction of Cairo’s architectural constructions (Fig. 9). The sequence configures the verbal narrative line that has assumedly occurred before the events of the novel begins. It also relates to an earlier entry about Hanafī Ahmed Hassan, another well-known singer of popular lyrics. His most reputed ballad is ShafīqaandMetwalī an old popular ballad about the shame killing of Shafīqa, upon the denouncement of her secret love bond with Metwalī. This entry preludes the series of killings taking place among the Association’s members towards the close of the novel. It enhances the element of betrayal, denouncement, and distress. Distress is sensed on the local and international levels.
29The prelude included the morbid graphic spread, ironically captioned “You’re looking for paradise while it surrounds you”; a chapter titled “Music’s Cemetery,” recounting betrayals and disappointments; the finale’s prelude–an episode also titled, “Music’s Cemetery,” alluding to the decline of harmonious living. In the finale is the announced death of music acts as a commentary on Paprika’s schemes, a leading member of the Architects Association, who along with her accomplices are proceeding with their atrocious plan–the mutilation of Cairo’s architectural and cultural history. The chapter evokes a dolorous tempo of a musical piece, and sounds the dissonance of the chaotic events. This noise, the concoction of a medley of fraudulent plans and horrendous events is allied to the constant denouncement of listeners to old musical pieces as inhibited individuals devoid of the joy of life. This sad prelude commences a series of upcoming disasters, along with a grotesque sequential panel.
The episodes at the closure render mysterious events, marking the sudden disappearance of protagonists, either by departure, death, escape, or floating away in a hot air balloon. The mystery is intensified by the narrator-protagonist’s self-reflexive awareness that he may merely be an idea, an image, a simulacrum the way Cairo City has always been (UL 196, 198). In line with this indeterminacy, the recognizable figures in Zorkany’s drawings are never repeated in the same style; they acquire new attributes with the changing situations, never becoming attached to an archetype, or reduced to a referent. By analogy, the mysteries are not resolved by magical resolutions; unresolvedness is a strategy inducing the reader to become aware of the constructedness of all narratives related to the self, Cairo, or a single global cultural history. By subverting readers’ expectations the verbal visual narrative affirms its dissidence, its opposition to ideologically charged generic and formal conventions established by mainstream literature or art. The use of spatio-temporal strategies offers empowering alternatives that are more engaging to local and global readers alike by opening up spaces for different points of view, engaging them in identifying conflicting perspectives.
31It is no wonder that novels that are graphic in part or whole are finding better chances to be translated despite their limited number. Jaqueline Brendt has postulated in her introduction to Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale (2010) that bande dessinée, manga and manhau, historietas, beeldverhalen and fanzines “share the inclination toward escaping the ‘national’” (Brendt 5). UsingLife crosses borders by appropriating classical global and local multimodal sources across historical periods. It shifts inadvertently between Lucretius, classical and popular Arabic sources, global and local singers’ lyrics, high stylized classical Arabic language, everyday Egyptian dialects, and obscene language; all speech registers used are mutually unintelligible. Likewise, the graphic images toggle between various design layouts, inspired by various artistic styles unlimitedly.
32UsingLife transgresses boundaries among visual, verbal, and aural—mainstream and popular, and tends to be transcultural. Both Naji and Zorkany declined claims for national particularities, and this is evident in their joint work. Naji has broken with the classical Arabic tradition and mainstream culture that claim objectivity through “the signifying units of a language […] that are impersonal” (Bakhtin 1986, 95). Their creative work is in Bakhtinian terms a heteroglossia of languages, acknowledging a multifarious community of addressees, along with a changing relationship between speaker and addressee(s) that can never come to a standstill. The use of different speech registers is a technique of engagement, immersing the readers from disparate communities by providing them with space to become “actively responsive” (Bakhtin 1986, 95), by allowing “various social ‘languages’ […] to interact with one another” (Bakhtin 1992, 282).
33Correspondingly, Zorkany broke away with classical art training at the Faculty of Fine Arts, in Cairo, as well as with comics styles used by emerging Egyptian comics artists’ inspired by American and European comics. His drawings are aimed at trained and untrained viewers belonging to varied social communities. His visual language is in different styles since they are not reaching out for a fixed code, rather engaging viewers outside the framework of social conventions in order to establish a familiarity reaching their sensations. Familiar speech and unofficial art styles can “play a positive role in destroying the official medieval picture of the world,” Bakhtin postulates, giving examples from literary history (Bakhtin 1986, 97). Naji and Zorkany both aimed at a new strategy for engagement by opening fiction and graphics to “layers of language that had previously been under speech constraint” (Bakhtin 1986, 97). This is made clear in an interview Naji had with Mona Kareem, where he expressed his belief that the traditional novel is “nearing extinction […] and images continue to take over the human consciousness, leaving us with a new language” (Kareem 2014 npn).
34Along the same lines, Groensteen postulates that towards the end of the twentieth century comics are “becoming literature,” or what we call the graphic novel. He quotes Alain Berland, that a comics author should engage “in multiple hybridization with other artistic disciplines” (Groensten 175). Groensteen does not see that this would lead to an “artist’s book.” Naji’s and Zorkany’s joint book shows that the need to hybridize is an urge to run counter to the mainstream. Their multimodal text belongs to a worldwide emerging youth subculture seeking uninhibited means of communication to engage addressees by touching on their sensations, while being indifferent to cultural legitimacy. Lambeens and Pint argue that an: “intelligent combination of code and sensation in fact reveals the distinctive possibilities of the comic genre in comparison to other more established genres like film, literature or painting” (Lambeens and Pint 255). Comics have opened new possibilities for Egyptian writers and artists, and the word “komix” has become a loanword appropriated in Egyptian dialect. Subsequently, komix calls for a cross-cultural method of research that resists compartmentalization within one critical scholarship.
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BRENDT, Jaqueline, (ed.). “Introduction: attempts at cross-cultural comic studies.” Comic Worlds and the World ofComics:TowardsScholarshiponaGlobalScale. (Series, Global Manga Studies, vol. 1). International Manga Research Center, Kyoto Seika University, 2010. The Coptic Museum, Cairo. http://www.coptic-cairo.com/museum/selection/manuscript/manuscript.html
El SHAFEE, Magdy. Metro. Cairo: Mohammed El Sharqawy, 2008. Translated by Chip Rosetti. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012.
ELLESTROM, Lars (ed.). Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Hampshire: Macmillan, 2010. Palgrave, 10.1057/9780230275201
FATHI, Ibrahīm. Kumīdyaal-Hukumal-Shumūliyy . [The comedy of totalitarian regimes.] Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1991.
GROENSTEEN, Thierry. ComicsandNarration. Translated by Ann Miller. Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2013.
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In 1989, Egyptian billionaire businessman Nassef Sawiris walked in to a trade fair at the Marriott Hotel in Cairo. Various luxury goods were exhibited alongside high-end furniture and expensive antiques. An exhibition of works by important artists of the period occupied one corner. The portraitist and still-life painter Sabry Ragheb was the most prominent member of that group. The exhibition organizers, Shahira Idris and Ghada Shahbandar, were venturing their first steps into the world of collecting, buying, and selling art; Ragheb had loaned them one of his favorite paintings as a gesture of appreciation.
Sawiris fell in love with the work, a still-life of a red rose, and as with any love at first sight, the world was no longer the same. He asked to buy the painting. Shahbandar and Idris responded that the work was not for sale, but Sawiris insisted. At his urging, Shahabandar contacted Ragheb, who was angered by the request and refused. Still, Sawiris persisted. In response, the artist demanded a then unheard of sum for the work, equivalent to three times the standard market price: LE 10,000. Sawris’s response was quick and decisive: “Agreed.”
The sale set a new benchmark. According to Shahbandar, Ragheb’s painting represented the most expensive painting sold at the time by a contemporary Egyptian artist. In this period the market was in flux and prices, which previously had settled in the hundreds of Egyptian pounds, reached into the thousands. Urban sprawl led to the establishment of new satellite cities outside of Cairo. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 edged the last remnants of an ideal of Arab unity toward collapse. Maps were changing, and the Arab art market was taking its first shaky steps.
The world before 1989
In the 1950s and 1960s, the state nationalized artistic life in Egypt; the cultural administration was restructured and most significant artistic initiatives and cultural spaces operated under state supervision. In the 1980s, only a handful of private galleries were operating in Cairo. Prior to the sale of Ragheb’s work in 1989, says Shahbandar, the maximum amount paid for a painting was no more than LE 3000. According to her, the Safar Khan Gallery and Tareq al-Marsafi’s Arabesque Gallery represented the most prominent art spaces at the time. The audience for art was limited primarily to a short list of names of collectors who confined their purchases to the works of already prominent, well-established artists. Nevertheless, economic liberalization policies were already having an effect and art’s relationship to the market was beginning to change, witnessing a gradual increase in prices and the emergence of a broader public interest in the arts.
In this period, the state largely withdrew from the cultural sphere. In partnership with her friend Shahira Idris, Shahbandar invested her energies in interior design and dealing antiques and paintings. The two also began visiting art shows and meeting with artists. At the time, many contemporary artists in Cairo had work spaces in Wikalat al-Ghoury, a caravanserai constructed in the early 16th century, or in one of the several other historic buildings the state had restored and lent to artists as studios. Visiting such places helped Shahbandar develop a wide network with artists of all generations.
Despite its many flaws, the state system worked well in many ways, and was comprehensive, providing artists with an overarching framework of support. In addition to offering studio spaces, the state sponsored galleries and ran an acquisitions committee, as well as juries that awarded prizes to artists. In the 1980s, however, Egypt was transitioning to a free market system, efforts were made to “re-organize” the public sector, and state spending was cut from all sides. As international corporations entered the Egyptian market, private exhibitions were held at Cairo’s five-star hotels for the country’s new economic elite. It was at these shows that Shahbandar and Idris displayed works by contemporary artists for the first time. Their exhibitions attracted the attention of a segment of the public, and the two branched out, organizing shows lasting just over a week in private residences, often in the empty apartment of an acquaintance. Their clientele grew as a result, as did the circle of artists they worked with.
Shahbandar and Idris exhibited works by artists who had come to prominence after 1952 including Salah Taher, Hussein Bicar, Gazbia Sirry, Maurice Farid and Nagy Basilios, as well as younger artists active in the period, some of whom went on to pursue high profile careers such as Samir Fouad, while others, such as Huda Khaled and Fatima Rifaat, remained relatively obscure. Other artists, such as Hassan Soliman, refused to work with the duo because he objected to exhibiting in makeshift gallery spaces. He did, however, recommend artist-colleagues with whom he thought Shahbandar and Idris might be interested in collaborating.
Shahbandar was active in the art world from 1986 through the mid-1990s, making a name for herself as one of the scene’s most prominent figures. Nevertheless, the material returns were modest, and she was unable to lease a place permanently and transform it into a fully equipped gallery. She continued to work on her own and began receiving various requests for consultancy services. The influx of international corporations to Egypt introduced new work habits and marketing strategies. These companies recognized art’s ability to serve as a foil for the identity of the company or corporation and as a long-term investment. The international corporations that had recently begun operating in Egypt, approached Shahbandar for assistance in selecting art for their offices. She chose works and arranged them in the local headquarters of several large companies including those of American Express and Carpet City. On occasion, she was asked to work on a smaller scale: for example, acquiring paintings for the office of a company executive or installing works on a single floor.
In 1990, Stefania Angarano arrived on an exploratory visit to found Mashrabia Gallery in downtown Cairo. Previously, she had worked at a number of Italian galleries specializing in contemporary art. Angarano recalls how, when she arrived in Cairo, some galleries were displaying and selling paintings paired with couches and other pieces of furniture. Her primary aim in coming to Cairo was to establish a space that presented art as an integrated whole, rather than as an element of interior design chosen to match the drapes.
Art enters the free market
The factors contributing to the transformation of the art market in the late 1980s were not limited to the entrance of international corporations. In this period, the government expanded construction projects and support for the capital’s new satellite cities, resulting in significant growth in the real-estate market, especially to the west and east of Cairo, with the construction of 6th of October City and areas around Nasr City and the Fifth Settlement. Within the city’s existing bounds, villas were being torn down to make way for apartment buildings, while on the margins, opulent mansions sprang up. An economic elite that had emerged on the back of the open-market, or infitah, policies introduced by President Anwar Sadat in the 1970s took to buying art as a means of generating (and flaunting) class distinctions; hanging original paintings and works of art in the home became a marker of social exclusivity. This was a period of great extravagance.
At the same time, many works by leading artists of the early 20th century, which had previously remained out of sight, became available during this period, including sculptures by Mahmoud Moukhtar and paintings by Mahmoud Said: perhaps the most celebrated of the “pioneer-generation” artists credited with founding a modern Egyptian art movement. In an emerging market lacking sufficient legislation and institutional oversight, counterfeits proliferated. Soon, Shahbandar found that in addition to her role as art dealer she was also compelled to act as an investigator: examining the authenticity of each painting. She tells the story of one incident in which she was asked to appraise a painting by Hussein Bicar. When she brought the painting to the artist for verification, he smiled slowly and told her that it was a good painting, but it wasn’t his; someone had imitated his style.
Nude with the Golden Bracelets and The Reciter
This hothouse climate in the art market tended to foster the sale of certain kinds of works over others. The depiction of nudity represented one of the primary factors informing the kinds of works circulating in the market after 1989. Sultan al-Qassemi, chairman of Barjeel Securities and founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation, recalls that images of nude paintings by Mahmoud Said published in an auction house catalog of the period were censored. At the same time Karim Francis, director of the Karim Francis Gallery in downtown Cairo, defends this approach, which he frames as a response to laws in Arab countries regulating the display of nudity rather than any rules imposed by the auction houses themselves. Shahbandar, for her part, believes that the moral basis for an assessment of the value of a work of art or the tepid reception of paintings of nudes can be attributed to the predominance of specific social values.
لوحة لمحمود سعيد
In the early 1990s, Shahbandar exhibited a painting by Said, which was priced at less than LE 100,000. The Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris had turned down the work — titled Nude with Gold Bracelets(1946) — preferring, instead, she reports, to purchase and display Said’s The Reciter (date unconfirmed). Representatives of the Institut claimed that the painting of the pious reciter of the Quran was more representative of Egyptian art than a painting of a nude, dark-skinned woman. According to Shahbandar, “In the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s, a general social climate prevailed that rejected paintings of nudes. This was not just due to the spread of Islamism; it involved all sectors of society.” Sitting in her home, Shahbandar gestures toward a painting by Sabry Ragheb depicting a girl applying makeup in front of a mirror and wearing a short, black nightdress. The painting had been purchased by a woman from a middle class, Coptic family. A few days later, the client returned, asking to exchange the work because her daughter would not tolerate having a painting of a nude in the home. What Shahbandar describes as mutable social mores came to inform the practices of cultural institutions, such as the Institut du Monde Arabe, that played a prominent role on the international stage and sought to influence perceptions of Arab identity abroad. The same values came into play in even the most basic forms of social organization, such as the family. Shahbandar tells of how she would use her own exhibition space to display nude paintings by Georges Sabbagh from private family collections because the children of the owners refused to display the works and approached her for help in selling them.
Others, such as Mohamed Talaat, the director of Misr Gallery in Cairo’s upscale neighborhood of Zamalek, believe that those social values that discouraged the exhibition of nudity have since changed. In 2012, for example, Misr Gallery exhibited various works created by Nadine Hammam over the course of the period following the January 25 revolution of 2011. The exhibition, titled Tank Girl, was composed of acrylic paintings representing the eponymous female nude who confronts the viewer from atop a tank with her legs spread, transforming the barrel of the gun into a larger than life size phallus. An explanatory booklet accompanying the exhibition framed the work in the following terms:
Through her work, which she has titled Tank Girl, the artist sets out to reconfigure stereotypes and established beliefs. Simulating this reformulation a combination of power inversions, a woman controls one of the most vicious war machines, the tank, as a symbol suggesting ‘woman’s’ ability to impose her power and prevail in the battle to assert their existence.
The booklet closes with a paragraph that explains: “Through her treatment of these complex symbols, the artist hopes to locate a more active role for modern women in the political and social scene. Here, Tank Girl represents every Egyptian woman.” According to Talaat, those collectors with an interest in buying art today are attracted to the more contemporary works in various media and don’t have a problem works that contain nudity or even erotic content, such as works in the Eros collection byel-Dessouki Fahmi, a portion of which was also shown at Misr Gallery.
New adventurers
Until the mid-1990s, there were no clear laws on the art market for setting prices and confirming the authenticity of works of art. An ethical code existed, but no supervisory body. Artists set their prices and the galleries exhibited their works, earning a percentage on sale. Some of the artists active in the 1980s harbored misgivings about this system and asked galleries to purchase their works instead of handing them over directly for consignment. At the same time, artists were not immune to questionable behavior, and cutting out the middleman by selling work at a lower price than that advertised in the gallery constituted one of the worst possible violations of the ethical code yet, apart from the latter, Egypt has no laws in place regulating the art market.
A case brought against the Aida Ayoub Gallery in 2005(Case 2238/3) laid bare some of the flaws in Egypt’s art market. Aida Ayoub began working in the art world in the early 1990s, and sold her clients dozens of paintings forged by the late artist Yousri Hassan. After opening her gallery, Ayoub quickly established a broad network in Egypt’s art world and was awarded the honorary title “patron of the arts” by the Minister of Culture. The forgeries were only discovered when May Zaid, one of Ayoub’s clients, tried to insure some of the paintings she had purchased, only to discover the deceit. Due to the absence of Egyptian laws penalizing art forgery, the courts dealt with the case as an act of fraud.
The uptick in activity in the Egyptian art market stemmed from the drive among the new upper middle class to acquire artwork. Some of these individuals were encouraged to enter the market based on a business approach that relied on a logic of quick gains. Until the mid-1990s, most owners of private galleries in Egypt were women whose interest in art had prompted their entry into the field; the need to make a profit proved a secondary consideration. Sherwet Shafie represented another prominent art world figure. Shafie had opened the Safar Khan Gallery after leaving her position as a program presenter on Egyptian television in the 1960s. While Safar Khan Gallery still operates today, Shahbandar stopped working in the field in the mid-1990s due, she claims, to the type of clients who were beginning to take an interest in art. She recalls standing with the artist on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition she had organized, when they overheard a client saying she wanted to buy a painting because the colors matched her living room interior. The artist was insulted and pleaded with her not to sell the painting to that client. In 2005, Shahbandar would found Shayfeencom (We are watching you), a movement that aimed to uncover the corruption and electoral fraud of the Mubarak regime. She would later become one of the most prominent names in political activism, especially after the 2011 revolution.
Shahbandar withdrew from the field just as the new adventurers were entering. At the time, Karim Francis was embarking on a journey of self-discovery which took him from working in the import/export business to tourism, and, finally, to art. Francis devoted three years to reading about art and familiarizing himself with artists and various artistic practices before opening his own gallery. He held his first show in 1995 in an apartment he owns on Sherifein Street in downtown Cairo. The group exhibition, titled Identity, included works by artists such as Mohamed Abla, as well as literary works, displaying manuscripts belonging to the celebrated novelist Sonallah Ibrahim.
Sitting in his gallery, surrounded by sculptures by Sobhy Guirguis, Francis recalls his beginnings:
When I started working in the art world, most buyers were receptive to works by the older, well-established names. Quite simply, each buyer felt in touch with the artists of their generation. However, motivated by my own passion, I wanted to put new names and new ideas in art out there that had not yet been seen in the market. I held a series of group shows titled New Talents to introduce artists whose work was being shown for the first time, as well as to show artistic modes and experimentation that went beyond paintings hanging on a wall, including installation artworks and video art.
This spirit of innovation and embrace of the unfamiliar would come to define the direction of the art scene in the late-1990s and early 2000s. Francis, alongside other gallerists active in the period and espousing similar ambitions, helped provide a platform for the emergence of a number of artists who are often referred to collectively as “the 90s generation.”
The joy of the sale
In the 1990s, state financial policies continued to liberalize so as to integrate Egypt into the new world market, and Egypt signed many partnership agreements with the European Union. These agreements included articles explicitly referencing cultural cooperation; a number of foreign cultural institutions became active in Egypt. Initially, these institutions were viewed with a great deal of suspicion, and were boycotted by art critics: most prominently Osama Afifi, who understood the activities of foreign cultural and arts organizations to represent a form of interference with Egypt’s natural course and part of a larger plan to destabilize Egyptian national identity. From the Ford Foundation to the Townhouse gallery (to borrow Afifi’s examples), the arts organizations that played an important role in supporting contemporary artistic practices were subjected to attacks of treason and suspicion, to the extent that art critic Sobhi el-Sharoni described the role of these organizations as malicious in his book Encyclopedia of Egyptian Fine Arts in the Twentieth Century.
This model of arts organization does not rely on selling art but, rather, approaches art within a developmental framework, operating according to different economic rules. Despite various drawbacks, this approach proved to be an effective stimulus for contemporary art practices and provided young artists with the space to branch out and experiment with installation and video art. These media are difficult to sell, and works in this vein have not been well-received historically by government arts institutions; the 1990s generation of artists was marginalized and alienated from official institutions that continued to show and display art that was considered more representative of “Egyptian identity.”
In the midst of this struggle and the changes taking place in the art world, Karim Francis was attempting to create a third model, closer to that espoused by Stefania Angarano, the director of Mashrabia Gallery, who refused to work with artists teaching in arts academies or exhibit the paintings of deceased artists, preferring to focus instead on contemporary Egyptian art. Francis declined the opportunity to convert the gallery into an establishment that relied on outside funding and preferred to pursue his own path. He made this choice not because he believed that accepting funding would make him a “traitor,” as per the widespread accusations against institutions that relied on these sources, but for other reasons, which Francis enumerates as follows:
جاذبية سري
First, I’m not convinced by the idea of organizations that fund the arts. Personally, if I was given money, I wouldn’t work and struggle so hard to show and sell art. Also, the issue of “selling” in itself is the job of a gallery owner, not only for the sake of material gain but also because it lends the work an added sense of value. I feel a real joy when I sell a work of art. Second, the work model of funding organizations turns the artist and the gallery owner into employees who receive monthly funds. Selling art grants you a greater freedom. Third, working with these organizations is demanding, there is a lot of paperwork, routine procedures, and funding applications to fill out that contain questions that are, in my opinion, meaningless, yet you’re forced to answer them and say what the funders want to hear, or to clothe what you’re doing in their concepts and development terms. In a private gallery all you need is a license and commercial registration.
At the same time, Francis does accept funding from these organizations for the work of certain artists, especially for costly video art which cannot be sold afterwards.
The Karim Francis Gallery was one of the first places that opened its doors to the 1990s generation, many members of whom have now become internationally celebrated artists and whose works can sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Francis mentions that, in the 1990s, he showed a work of Ghada Amer priced at LE5,000, and no one was interested in buying it. Now the same work sells for US$165,000. He laughs, remembering the surprise on the faces of gallery visitors when they encountered works of installation art: “There were very few sales. So I thought, why don’t we open things up to new experiments and practices? The visitors did not understand what was going on and I was showing these experiments and works in an attempt to understand and absorb and to create a dialog around these new ideas.”
In this period, Karim Francis Gallery, Mashrabia Gallery and Townhouse played a vital role in posing alternatives and new paths for art practice. In 2000, the three locations collaborated to put on the Nitaq Festival; a second festival was held the following year and was designed to correspond with the launch of the Cairo Biennale. Negar Azimi (a former employee of the Townhouse) describes this event in an article as: “the most palpable sign that the Egyptian art scene as we knew it had been shaken up.” According to Azimi, the festival was significant for:
the view it provided as to the tendencies of a new generation of artists working within idioms that defied prevailing notions of contemporaneity. Engineered to start on the very day of the 2001 Cairo Biennale’s opening, the second Nitaq in particular served as an ‘off’ version in every sense of the term. While the Biennale was characterized by a reliance on tradition both in concept and curation, Nitaq would prove most unconventional, shaking up stagnant conceptions surrounding the use of space, medium and the potential for dematerialization of the art object. Like true post-modernists, the preferred avenue of expression for the artists at Nitaq was multi-media installation executed with conceptualist tendencies. A number of the Nitaq artists, Lara Baladi, Amina Mansour, Hassan Khan, Wael Shawky and Mona Marzouk among them, have since gone on to exhibit widely internationally.
The event would come to represent a landmark in the history of contemporary art in Egypt: signaling the entrance of a new coterie of artists and institutions, and, with them, new practices and understandings of art. At the same time, the market horizons for this work were expanding.
Auctioneers in the cities of the desert and bourgeois gold
In a recent interview, Sultan al-Qassemi noted the absence of a healthy demand for Egyptian art in the 1990s: “There was art, even in the 90s, but there wasn’t a market for art in Egypt, and there was a near total absence of Egyptian art outside of Egypt. Collectors of Egyptian art could be counted on one hand, most prominently Mohammed Said Al-Farsi, the mayor of Jeddah, and the emir of Qatar, Hassan bin Mohamed Al Thani.” Nevertheless, with the beginning of a new century, cities in the Gulf were rapidly acquiring international status, and the skyscrapers rising in Doha competed with those of Dubai. The entrance of auction houses at this particular moment would have a significant effect on the market for works from Egypt and the region.
Francis relates that at the start of the new millennium, he began to receive invitations and friendly advice to go to Dubai, where the art market was already strong and expanding as a result of the rapid growth of the real estate market. After ten years of involvement in the art world, he had made a name for himself both locally and internationally. During this period, Francis met a European interior designer working in Dubai and she began working with him in selecting art for her projects. In 2005, he was visited by members of a delegation from Christie’s auction house who sought to familiarize themselves with Egyptian and Arab art and art markets. Francis accompanied them to a number of studios, including those of the prominent artists Adel el-Siwi, Mohamed Abla, and Adam Henein. The auctioneers were undertaking their first exploratory visits of the Arab art market by visiting a number of Arab cities in preparation for the inauguration of branches in Dubai and the wider Gulf region.
In a 2012 study of the Middle Eastern art market, The Rise of the Middle Eastern Art Market Since 2006, author Taymour Grahne quotes Philipp Hoffmann, executive director of the Fine Art Fund Group, as setting the total value of the Middle Eastern art market at US$10 billion; this value was expected to triple in coming years. By the end of 2005, Christie’s had opened its first branch in the Middle East. Sotheby’s and Bonhams followed suite. The establishment of these auction houses had a transformative effect on the status of Arab art. Qassemi describes some of these changes:
These houses employed art scholars and experts to study and appraise Egyptian art and did reports to verify the proposed numbers. Sometimes, we’d hear about works selling for outrageous amounts but we had no way to verify these numbers; the houses worked to verify them. The auction houses reduced the number of fakes threatening the Arab art market, due to the passing off and sale of art forgeries without verifying their authenticity or history. The houses produced authenticated catalogs of Egyptian artists. There is a catalogue raisonné documenting all of the works of Mahmoud Said, Ramses Younan, and other greats, which became essential references for their work.”
When I asked Syrian artist Youssef Abdelke recently why people in Dubai, the Gulf and Cairo buy art at these prices, he replied, “everything the bourgeoisie touches turns to gold” — attributing the statement to Karl Marx. If auction houses aim primarily to generate more and more “gold,” a law governing the art market must first be established for pricing works of art. In a market where opinions and critical judgments are up for debate, the auction is one of the few institutions that leaves the task of determining the price of a work of art to the free market. On this basis, the work of a particular artist is assigned a monetary value that becomes, as Mohamed Talaat says, a reference point for future sales.
At the same time, Talaat explains that the art market and its main site of exchange in the Gulf-based auction houses possess blind spots which leave them open to manipulation. He tells of how some galleries might offer the works of young artists they represent to auction houses, only to turn around and purchase the same works for a high price at auction through an agent. As a result, the value of an artist’s work increases and art collectors are encouraged to seek them out. After prices have multiplied, the gallery re-exhibits and resells the artist’s work. However, Qassemi takes a different view regarding the manipulation of auction bidding to increase the price of an artist’s work: “This might have occurred at the beginning, but now it would be difficult for such a thing to happen because the market is very narrow, and if a gallery did such a thing it would be discovered immediately, because the market is small and we all know what’s out there.”
While warning against the misuse of the auction system, Talaat also complains of national biases perpetuated by gallerists in the region, claiming:
Iranian businessmen and millionaires mostly reside in Dubai, therefore, they buy works by Iranian artists, who have come to represent a large portion of the art market shared by Arab art. And the Iranians aren’t satisfied with just acquiring art; they also support projects promoting Iranian art in Dubai and the Arab countries. Galleries in Syria and Lebanon also have a clear bias against Egyptian art, to the degree that the director of a Syrian gallery announced a while ago in an interview that the only artists on the market are Syrian artists. On the other hand, there are galleries in Egypt that do not coordinate with each other at all.
Francis holds a different opinion, stating that he has held shows for Egyptian artists in Lebanon and Syria. He adds, “galleries might collaborate on a given project, but we can’t work together or coordinate with each other because, frankly, we’re competitors in the same market.” Whether at the auction house or in the gallery, the value assigned to works of art is often determined by a system that rewards the self-interest of those with a profit to make from the sale of work.
Ultimately, the market is supported by art collectors who invest heavily in particular names, acquiring the works of these artists with the goal of building savings and investing in property, as a painting that is worth “ten” today might reach a hundred in a few years. Such individuals seek to protect the market and enforce the rules governing it, so as to guard the value of their investments. The collapse of the market or any fundamental change in the laws of appraisal and pricing that regulating it, translates into a loss in the assets of art collectors and a collapse of their investments.
Modern art in the museum
Outside interest in acquiring modern Egyptian art originated in the 1960s, as students from Gulf states moved to Egypt to pursue advanced education or for various other reasons, and were exposed to the works of modern and contemporary artists. As Qassemi recounts, there were four major art collectors in the Arab Gulf as early as the 1980s. The most significant of these belonged to Mohammed Said al-Farsi, the mayor of Jeddah, and owner of the largest collection of works by modern Egyptian artists. The private art collection of Qatar’s Sheikh Hassan Al Thani would serve as the seed of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. Currently, he claims, the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art still possesses the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in the region comprised of some 12,000 pieces. At the same time, the museum operates within an extremely limited annual budget of LE 2 million. While the National Public Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Algiers (MAMA) stands in second place with a collection of some 8,000 works, Doha’s Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art is quickly closing in from behind.
نادين همام
Talaat graduated from Cairo’s College of Fine Arts in 1999. In addition to his work as an artist, he took an interest in organizing exhibitions. In 2005, he was appointed director of the Arts Palace at the Cairo Opera House, where he worked with the artist Mohsen Shaalan who was serving at the time as the head of the Fine Arts Sector in the Ministry of Culture. Talaat relates that in the period in which he served as director of the Arts Palace there was something of a boom in the art market in that a new breed of collector interested in young artists appeared on the scene and new Arab markets opened up, while state institutions continued to lag behind.
The state’s newfound interest in these artists stemmed, in part, from the esteem their works enjoyed abroad, and was fueled by an attempt to recover its original position of influence in the arts sphere. Galleries such as the Townhouse served as international authorities on contemporary Egyptian art and were called upon regularly to nominate artists to participate in initiatives outside of Egypt: a role historically monopolized by the Ministry of Culture. However, despite breakthroughs and attempts at change initiated by Shaalan, the Fine Arts Sector’s performance in this regard was limited by its restricted budget, and continued to weaken after 2010, Talaat claims. Eventually, Talaat grew discouraged with the rejection of many of his project proposals. His experience in the state arts’ administration qualified him to pursue work as an art consultant: developing collections for a number of real estate and tourism companies. He also launched plans to open his own space.
While the Egyptian government sector was scaling down its involvement in the arts, Gulf-state governments, and, in particular, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Qatar, were becoming increasingly active players in the field and initiating construction on various museum projects. Yet, in doing so, they have pursued distinct aims and cultivated varying approaches. Thus, each state in the region pursues a different policy in acquiring art. According to Qassemi:
In the UAE, the government purchases and acquires works of art through a museums authority, which has a board of specialists who study paintings and determine what to purchase. There are regulations governing acquisitions, and certain museums don’t buy art from auction houses. In Qatar, the decision to purchase a work is instantaneous and is made quickly depending upon the market and what is on offer. Qatar also buys from auction houses. The most significant purchase it made at an auction was the painting Les Chadoufs by Mahmoudd Said, which sold for more than US$2.4 million.
Likewise, in a study titled Re-Inventing the Museum in Abu Dhabi and Qatar?, Laura Damême explains how these particular governments have used museums to achieve various objectives. In both Abu Dhabi and Qatar, the number of foreign workers and residents in 2010-2011 stood at over 80 percent of the total population. In Abu Dhabi, Damême claims, the government uses museums to present itself as a global capital offering international-brand museums such as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Louvre Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, in choosing to build the Museum of Islamic Art and Mathaf, Qatar approaches museums as a means of asserting the cultural specificity and Muslim-Arab identity of its citizens, which account for no more than 15 percent of the total population.
Qassemi adds another possible explanation for the considerable investments made by Gulf countries in the art market: Building museums carries a clear political message. The erection of important new centers of cultural and artistic preservation and display projects an image of these governments as capable of meeting the needs of their citizens, in addition to bolstering the terms of national and cultural identity.
The art market in the Arab world: At the intersection of real estate and oil money
Wealth in the Middle East is concentrated primarily within two markets: real estate and oil. Those familiar with the contemporary history of the arts and the art market in the region can see clearly how the money pouring in from these sources has played a key role in shaping and altering the market. The relationship of art to real estate originated in an understanding of art as an element of interior design. The separation of art from interior design required gallery owners to take significant risks on less conventional works of art. Art’s autonomy from the realm of décor also relied on the subsequent development of a greater appreciation amongst many buyers for the immaterial, as well as the material value of art. With the expansion of the real estate market and urban sprawl in the satellite cities popping up outside of Cairo, the interest of the Egyptian economic elite in acquiring works of art steadily increased. Art, and the acquisition of art, became important markers of social status amongst the upper and upper middle classes.
The relationship of art to real estate became salient again when art was taken up as a vehicle for re-branding the city of Dubai. In the past decade, art has played a central role in the formulation of the image of Gulf countries, which compete to acquire art collections in a race to establish museums that reflect a progressive image of these states, while also converting art into material assets, or a form of investment and savings.
However, despite the surge occasioned by this outside interest in the Egyptian art market, exhibition halls in Cairo have tended to privilege modern art over work by contemporary artists. Moreover, local cultural and social mores inform the processes of selling and appraising art. Works with sexual, religious or politically sensitive content are particularly likely to be excluded from the market. Nevertheless, the market’s relative upswing is related to the appearance of young art collectors who no longer possess the same inhibitions as their predecessors and who are more receptive to purchasing contemporary works of art that reflect some of the spirit of the present moment.
An
overwhelming sense of excitement and familiarity arises the moment the viewer’s
eye falls on Viktor Dyndo’s work. Familiarity is caused by the flag-burning
image, which has become a political fetish crowding the Internet and
television.
ألف ليلة وليلة- من أعمال فيكتور
On
the other hand, excitement is associated with the intense appearance of symbols
in an extraordinary atmosphere. However, Dyndo’s flag-burning image, which frequents
television coverage of mass demonstrations, does not propagandise a message.
The exception is, nonetheless, his
lampoons of ‘the liar Internet’ in several paintings. Perhaps, Dyndo’s paintings
on display in this exhibition carry eluding messages; the artist has probably
shifted this task to the viewer.
Initially,
the viewer has the impression that there is a kind of communication between
him/her and the paintings. Although contemporary art has become more
complicated, nebulous and intriguing, Dyndo’s introduced stereotyped images and
symbols, such as the national flags, politicians popular on television, and controversial
images recurring in the media.
However,
familiarity and excitement quickly subside, creating a perplexing atmosphere.
The viewer feels that the ground is moving as s/he searches the painting for a
keyword(s).
Although
Dyndo’s symbols and images are not extraordinary, they do not display signs,
which could draw our attention to the artist’s political leanings. He must be
inviting the viewer to examine his technique and colour so closely and
attentively that s/he could come across the artist’s eluding message therein.
Dyndo
must be aware that visitors, while touring his exhibition, would not stop
browsing through their mobile phones. He has concerns that the visitors would do
likewise by mistaking his paintings for being downloads. Therefore, the artist
seeks a technique of intrigue, which could appeal to the visual language of the
contemporary Internet captives. He cleverly treated his images to produce new values, which could
persuade the viewers to associate them with images recurring day and night,
such as the images downloaded on the Internet’s, news highlights on television,
[YouTube] uncut videos, images associated with political propaganda or the
visual icons of nationalist regimes.
Despite
the vogue for the conceptual art, Dyndo keenly sought a conventional medium—the
canvas—to express his ideas. He deliberately sought oil colours—not acrylic—to create
a sense of a halo around the image.
Dyndo
named his oeuvre in this exhibition “The Internet Telling Lies”. His oil
paintings are horizontal; their dimensions are equal to the laptop’s or the
dimensions of the book cover. As a result, the viewers find these paintings
familiar, reminding them of the contemporary man’s first sources of images.
Nonetheless,
Dyndo’s oil paintings and his isolated symbols reveal the vast distance between
the work and the political meaning the symbol could bear. The artist is fully
aware that symbols bear different meanings in different environments. For
example, Eastern and Western cultures would appreciate the same symbol
differently.
Dyndo’s
artistic experiment is the product of two different cultures. The artist
(b.1983) studied art in Poland and Egypt. He also exhibited his impressions in
several Arab and Western countries. An
image of intersected Polish and Saudi flags gives an impression in Poland different
from that, which an Arab culture would stir up. The portrait of the Pope of the Vatican
surmounting the statement “The Internet Telling Lies” must be stirring up a
multitude of interesting interpretations.
Danod’s
art provokes suspicions. Open-minded visitors should not close their eyes. They
should pay close attention to the whirlwind of images and paintings. That Dyndo
is maintaining that the Internet is telling lies should draw our attention to
the fact that reality is not a mansion built in the middle of a garden;
perhaps, reality is concealed under a brushstroke in the surface of the canvas.
Ahmed Naji 