30th March - 30th of June 2007
curated by William Wells
Sfeir-Semler
Gallery Beirut is pleased to invite you to its new show “ Out of
Place” with recent works of young emerging Egyptian artists. The
show is curated by William Wells, the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary
Art, Cairo. William Wells has selected nine artists whose work,
although very different in style, material and origin, is associated
with the appropriation of images, objects and emotional experiences.
Playing with time, space and social constructs, each artist uses
their own unique and powerful perspectives to question the nature
of the way we lead our (post) post-modern lives. Through this re-positioning
of the familiar we are forced to re-evaluate our preconceptions,
and unpack the cultural baggage we all carry with us. The following
participants have exhibited internationally and represent an exciting
new generation of artists working in Egypt today: |
| Hala El Koussy |
| Amal Kenawy |
| Mahmoud Khaled |
| Hassan Khan |
| Huda Lutfi |
| Basim Magdy |
| Mona Marzouk |
| Wael Shawky |
| Tarek Zaki |
born in 1974 Cairo, Egypt. Lives and works in Amsterdam and Cairo
Candyfloss Stories Candyfloss Stories opens with an old errant seller calling out to the lady of miracles to come to his rescue, to see what has become of the people and the city. This short film is based on interviews with Cairenes about their aspirations and frustrations interspersed with news bits relating to the city collected over the Internet. In cyclical fashion, the characters turn Cairo roofs into sets in which they are on “top of the world”: rooftops being ambiguous places that hover between the public and the private, the personal and the collective. The “New Comer to the City” talks of a coexisting parallel reality where titillating underwear is cheap and chickens are injected with hormones, the “Drug Addict” of writing his own obituary in the last pages of Al-Ahram, the “Ageing Man” of passing his expiry date while trees are dying and building are mushrooming... Rendered in black and white and scripted as prose with music commissioned by sound artist Cevdet Erek, the virtual journey of the candyfloss seller into the psyche of the people who negotiate their existence under the extreme conditions presented by the megalopolis, that is Cairo, concludes with his arrival at the ultimate top of the city: Mokattam, calling out the lady of miracles to come to the help of the “passer-by” in “no-man’s land”, yet his candyfloss stack is still full and fluffy. Candyfloss Stories is part of a 3 channel video installation commissioned for the project “Actual Position” by the Arts Council of Switzerland Pro Helvetia in 2005, Exhibition Copy, 17:00 min, Edition of 3 |
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| "Candyfloss Stories", Video installation, 2005 | "Candyfloss Stories", Video installation, 2005 | "Candyfloss Stories", Video installation, 2005 | ||
Amal Kenawy
born in 1974 Cairo, Egypt. Lives and works in Cairo
When
I search within myself, I perceive a self that has an independent
existence and that contains a set of laws which rule and govern
the body as a physical entity. However, the existence of the self
does not correspond to that of an individuality, hence my continuous
search to define my relationship to being and to nothingness. I
don’t think of my work as feminist in the traditional sense of the
word. In a way, I am concerned with pain and isolation, among other
sentiments. On a technical level, I try to create a visual language
accessible to different audiences, a language that transcends the
specificities of culture, be it Eastern or Western. I think of my
art as artwork made by a female artist. I see my creative process
as a tool for expression rather than crave to produce a final artwork.
I may have a heart that beats and functions regularly, but I cannot
confirm that I am alive. Emotions inhabit this human frame and make
a vessel of it. Therefore, I attempt to adjust my understanding
so as to perceive the self in a wider context, a context in which
these abstracted/removed emotions fluctuate between being memories
and dreams. Within such a framework, these abstract emotions appear
to me as constituting my true self, the self that I can see clearly,
beyond the narrow confines of my body. A few years ago, a certain
personal experience had a significant effect on my life. At that
point in time, I had not been working for more than two years. During
the period of retreat that I took, I kept a kind of diary. With
the passage of time, it became a private space, a sort of secret
garden where I was able to negotiate the elusive boundaries between
reality and memories. I later used it as a point of departure for
creating a visual narrative that allowed me to communicate all sorts
of emotions and sentiments, emotions that were sometimes loaded
with ambivalence and contradictions. My work is not specifically
about women in Muslim society, although it deals with the way humans
reflect the societies they inhabit or originate from. Humans, men
and women alike, including artists of both genders, experience the
issues and problems that afflict their societies. In my art, I focus
on understanding and consequently responding to these issues. |
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34x75x32 cm
35x44x27 cm
Mahmoud Khaled
born 1982 in Alexandria. Lives and works in Alexandria, Egypt
Re/Arranged
Marriage #1, California, is the first instalment in a series of
videos in which Khaled proposes to present us, the viewers, with
a record of the wedding ceremony from the angle of an outsider.
Existing in multivarious forms, the wedding ceremony is a socio-cultural
construct that has achieved the status of the sacred, with a set
of customs and traditions that have developed with the passage of
time in almost every culture. In this particular piece, Khaled’s
subject of choice is the ‘white wedding’, the model for the traditional
Western wedding in modern times. In Re/Arranged Marriage #1, he
focuses upon a single stage at the core of this typical marital
ceremony, the reception. Khaled offers us a voyeuristic peek (reproducing
his own) into this private and exclusive rite of passage. He implicates
viewers by sharing this stolen fragment in which he duplicates a
singular event twice: first by recording the ceremony and later
by mirror imaging the document he records. He intervenes further
by superimposing an additional layer to the work - a persistent
birdsong that resounds against the silence of the woods, simulating
nature. In Khaled’s multiple acts of ‘desecration’, a hint of astonishment
at the magnitude of the ceremony is clearly visible. The final product
he presents us with is both formal and balanced. The bride, groom
and their guests are in full costume, like performers on a stage.
Every single move they make is rehearsed and harmonious with the
manicured setting. But the fact remains that the artist as well
as the viewer remain detached from the composed drama. The work
points to the notion that society continues to celebrate orthodox
relationships that conform to its norms and values, when in reality,
these very rules have been constituted by society itself. Khaled’s
intervention suggests the naturalisation of the union between male
and female vis-à-vis ‘other’ types of relationships that are less
socially acceptable, a general strategy he hopes in employ in the
whole series. Text: Aleya Hamza |
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| exhibition view |
Hassan Khan
born in 1975, London. Lives and works in Cairo, Egypt
Khan
works in various media including performance, documentary film and
video, often engaging with the materiality of public space in his
work, having resorted to magazine inserts, city buses and private
apartments as carriers or venues. In the words of the artist, the
piece touches upon the widely interiorized, “automatic bourgeois
construct of the tormented artist, contrasted with the energy pertaining
to the density of public space and commerce, which is still related
to a sense of the ‘popular’ in the widest and carnivalesque sense
of the term.” Using an array of images scoured from the streets
of the city (all for less than the equivalent of 10 Egyptian Pounds)
to produce a kinetic ‘awkward’ and ‘minimal’ rearticulation. The
3 Face technique reminiscent of Chinese rulers from my childhood
proves to be an appropriate surface through which to touch the seductive
face of a popular culture that speaks many tongues. Automatic attempts
to touch the decidedly non-bourgeoisie nature of a certain mode
of cultural production where anonymity and automation are rules
of thumb and place that in juxtaposition of the practice of the
artist as a lone individual. Here we speak the sign as accident.
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| exhibition view | “Automatic is the Voice that Speaks“, 2006 | |
Huda Lutfi
born in 1948 Cairo, Egypt. Lives and works in Cairo
Huda
Lutfi is an artist and cultural historian. Her training as a historian
has influenced her work as an artist, juxtaposing historical past
and present, as well as traversing and fusing cultural boundaries.
The installation that Huda Lutfi is exhibiting, A Feminine Mandala,
is made up of wooden clogs (‘ub’aab) traditionally worn by Egyptian
women in the past. The more modern plastic sandals have replaced
these traditional clogs, and now women no longer buy them. Lutfi
deliberately chose to use the ‘ub’aab to integrate a dying artistic
tradition into contemporary art practice, to underline its aesthetic
sculptural value but also to use it as a metonymic reference to
the feminine. Feminizing the mandala’s circular structure emphasizes
notions of harmony and continuity, the feminine as an eternal creative
force in human existence. |
Basim Magdy
born in 1977 Assiut, Egypt. Lives in Cairo
Untitled,
2002-2006 is a drawing installation that uses work produced by the
artist during a four-year period as fragments of diverse situations
dealing with the construction of a collective understanding of power
.The situations depicted in the drawings range from military propaganda
images to absurd encounters with gorilla - human hybrids on a fishing
trip or while they watch TV. During the period the work was produced
in, the artist's interests have evolved to examine more subtle examples
of our need to believe in non-existent powers. The element of absurdity
introduced in this selection of work is designed to play with the
viewer's expectations and to propose alternatives to what is collectively
perceived from visual representations of power structures, and to
leave space for the viewer's imagination. |
drawing installation, dimensions variable
drawing installation, dimensions variable
drawing installation, dimensions variable
drawing installation, dimensions variable
Mona Marzouk
born in 1968 Alexandria, Egypt. Lives and works in Alexandria, Egypt
From
2003 till 2006 I produced a body of work consisting of three separate
series' of work. 'The Morphologist and the Architect', 2003-2004,
was a series of acrylic on canvas paintings that explore the possibilities
of an imagined interface between mythology, the animal kingdom and
man-made structures (architecture). 'Helmets', 2005, was a series
of wall paintings that probed into the History of the Helmet as
a structure with its many different manifestations in the battlefields
of war and sports, while making an attempt to link it to the world
of creatures other than man. Finally, 'Black Gold Odyssey', 2006,
was a mural project that attempted to visually recreate the links
and missing ties between oil as a natural product, oil as an industry
and nature on the whole by fusing elements related to the oil industry
with characteristics that refer to living beings. 'The New World
'. This new mural will borrow some of the elements from the series'
I described above and introduce them into a new domain, the domain
of the Flag, aiming to ask questions such as how are flags constructed?
How do they relate to the "real world" and how does one
identify with the symbology behind the structure of flags. I am
using the structure of the Star-Spangled Banner as the basis for
'The New World' replacing the original 13 star constellation in
the first American flag created by Betty Ross and George Washington
with a constellation of new individual entities that attempt to
defy the boundaries between history an present day, man-made and
natural, biomorphic and geometrical, personal and political, beautiful
and ugly and finally gender as a predefined structure. 'The New
World' should not be seen as a new flag for a nation but as a flag
for a non-nation where the seams between all opposites have been
blurred and new assemblages have come into existence as a result.
The specially designed and produced T-Shirts accompanying the mural
also call into question our notions of patriotism, nationalism,
ethnicity and purity in the most subtle of ways. The T-Shirt labels
will all have the words 100% Pure Egyptian Cotton woven into them,
gently leading one to ask what does it mean to be pure and what
does it mean to belong to a nation. |
Wael Shawky
born in 1971, Alexandria, Egypt. Lives and works in Alexandria, Egypt
Wael
Shawky’s dynamic, spontaneous drawings with the use of graphite,
pastels and silver pigments show different systems, which are randomly
layered together in order to show reality and beauty. In contrast
to his usual work which employs the medium of installation and video
work this exhibition will be showing simple subconscious drawings
that he feels offer an immediate translation. "Over the past 12 years my work has been concerned with a number of specific contexts (modernization, displacement, cultural hybridization, and marginalization). I then experienced a paradigm shift in my work on the levels of concept, practice and materials. Especially, how the material becomes translated in a “religious” fashion. The contrast arises out of how we actually deal with the material through a specific belief that is utilized within a functional practice- a certain pragmatic thinking. For example using asphalt in my work is religious because of a basic conceptual belief that the chemical properties of the material itself possesses a certain excess beyond function. Such a position takes the work into what I term the 'religious' ", |
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Tarek Zaki
born in 1975, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Lives and works in Cairo
Zaki collects witnesses of the present, converting them into found objects of the future. By sculpting objects of the everyday life, he positions the spectator as an archaeologist from the future, looking at remains of the present. Zaki is interested in how we deal with museums and artefacts. How we gaze at a certain object in a museum preserved in a vitrine. |
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| "Time Machine:
remembering
tomorrow, Missile I", 2004 |
"Time Machine:
remembering
tomorrow, Missile II", 2004 |
"Time Machine:
remembering
tomorrow, Missile III", 2004 |
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| "Time Machine:
remembering
tomorrow, Detail of a Fossil", 2004 |
"Time Machine:
remembering tomorrow, Keyboard", 2004 |
"Time Machine:
remembering tomorrow, Helmet", 2004 |
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