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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 May - 2 June 1999 Issue No. 431 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 May - 2 June 1999 Issue No. 431
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Living Features Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Ghosts of the fly-over
By Nur Elmessiri
A bridge to the future in Abla's 1999 vision of 21st century Cairo photos: Randa Shaath Egypt is ushering in the brave new millennium by flying Jean-Michel Jarre in from France to direct a laser show and music extravaganza at the foot of the Pyramids. This Hello 21st-Goodbye 20th will cost millions of dollars, but already, rumour has it, every single room in every single Cairo 5-star hotel is booked for the last night of the century. The right to broadcast this millennial show live, which satellite television channels are queuing up to buy, should also help to cover the costs of this spectacle. Future-facing pyramids can certainly rake in tourist and mass media revenue, all the better now that the city's state-of-the-art network of fly-overs will make it possible for the party crowd to bypass the complexities of historical Cairo on their way to the Giza Plateau.
The Pyramids and fly-overs -- specifically the Mounib which, among other things to do with "progress", will eventually enable residents of Qattamiya Heights to bypass Cairo on their holiday-making way to the North Coast -- figure prominently in the cityscapes constituting Mohamed Abla's current exhibition "Cairo: The New Millennium". But Abla's Cairo -- its earth the colour of autumn leaves dipped in grey, its Nile water brackish-green, grey and white by turns, its sky veiled with menacing clouds -- is, in most of the paintings on show, devoid of signs of human presence. The silence is oppressive; the street lamps -- raining light like lethal gas on empty chambers -- eerie.
What moves there? Nothing. Just the wind whistling in abandoned alleys, hissing through the windows of the uninhabited sky rises looming on the horizon, rustling the leaves of startled palm trees.
The 58 paintings on show were produced from the 12th floor of Abla's new Giza studio, and most of them follow a similar compositional pattern: in the foreground, an autumnal coloured tapestry of small buildings or a group of palm trees; in the background, pyramids or high rises; and in the middle something -- grey-green or sand-like -- vaguely recognisable as the River Nile. A fly-over will often, horizontally or diagonally but always assertively, cut through the body of the etherised patient that Cairo becomes under the alien (and alienated) gaze of her beholder.
The aerial perspective of these cityscapes has the effect of making the spectator feel like someone who, having been lost in some distant post-nuclear desert for 40 days and 40 nights, suddenly stumbles upon a city so long abandoned that the mere movement of the wind and clouds has the power to terrify.
"Pollution" seems to be the buzz word when talk of Abla's work is in the air. His exhibition before last ostensibly took the pollution of the Nile as its central topic. In this one, the oppressive, heavy, black presences in the sky -- most dramatically in Cloud, Before Dark, The Island, Bridge Over the Island and Pyramids and Palm Trees -- might be construed as signalling a sub-topical shift: from water to air pollution.
But this millennial show is not just about the damage being done to Cairo's natural environment. If it were, it wouldn't be half as interesting, would not powerfully express -- as it does -- a sense of apocalypse. Apart from in a minority of paintings showing couples clinging to each other against a backdrop of catacombnal buildings, or attempting love in a row boat, the city has become an empty, inorganic shell, inhabited by nothing that breathes; the only surviving life forms, the occasional wolf-like dog or palm trees vulnerably exposed to the icy, post-historical elements.
Towards the end of the previous century John Ruskin (1819-1900) -- Victorian art critic who eventually turned to social criticism and was to have a profound and lasting influence on British socialist thought -- gave a lecture entitled "The Storm Cloud of the 19th Century" which describes "a series of cloud phenomena... peculiar to our times" and interprets those "signs of the sky" as "signs of the times". Living at a time when industrialist-based capitalism was changing the face of the globe, Ruskin was horrified by the dehumanising effects that the then-still-nascent economic system was having on humanity. For Ruskin the ugly presences in the sky reflected those to which human beings were being subjected and the preservation and restoration of "nature" was, consequently, always rather more than a matter of installing filters in factory chimneys.
Snippets from his lecture about the strange new "plague cloud" and "plague wind" menacing late 19th century Britain capture the atmosphere in Abla's vision of new millennium Cairo: "Grey cloud; not rain cloud, but a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, but without any substance... or colour of its own..." "[A] wind of darkness... malignant... unconnected with any one quarter of the compass; it blows indifferently from all... It always blows tremulously, making the leaves of the trees shudder as if they were all aspens, but with a peculiar fitfulness which gives them... an expression of anger as well as of fear and distress... its sound is a hiss instead of a wail." "[The wind] looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly it may be; there are at least 200 furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men's souls."
Mohamed Abla smiles and tells me he has hope -- this in spite of having lost his lifetime's work (over 500 paintings) to the Musafarkhana fire, in spite of having been granted the horrific vision of a city teeming with humanity suddenly becoming a ghost town, a city in which time-saving "bridges" connect nothing to nothing, no one to no one.
The Last Child, painting no. 58 of the exhibition, shows a little boy with his pet camel rising skyward above the city. The child is smiling. Maybe Abla did not have the heart to tell him that he is the last of his kind. Children ask questions the answers to which might not necessarily be solid grounds for cheer.
