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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 Jan. - 2 Feb. 2000 Issue No. 466 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 Jan. - 2 Feb. 2000 Issue No. 466
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Not as in the hour
Nigel Ryan
Left: Véronique Audergon; above: Hermine van Rooy
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters If you happened to be strolling downtown last Thursday you might have sensed that something was abroad. On Thursday night the city centre is always crowded, so it was not the crowds on the pavement, not the crush of people elbowing each other, jostling before shop windows. But something, if you cared to notice, was slightly askew. A few people looking, perhaps, a little too cocktail partyish for Talaat Harb, walking purposefully at right angles to the general direction -- that up-down promenade -- negotiating kerbs a little too carefully before turning into alleyways that in broad daylight, on an ordinary day, they would not normally turn.
Thursday was the opening night of the downtown festival, a collaborative effort by the city centre art galleries, and a few restaurants, and strolling around town was that peculiar creature, the opening night crowd, some over-dressed, some underdressed, but all conscious that they were out to see art, and not window shop, or cruise, or simply promenade.
There were the old familiar faces, denizens once of the Odeon, and then the Grillon, habitués of the Atelier -- the disgruntled disestablishment intelligentsia, who have never played their self-appointed alternative roles with the necessary conviction, and more often with an unappealing whine. And the smart ones. And the young ones. All together, and all taking part in an event. It is something for which the organisers should be congratulated, for there was a pleasant, buzzy, esprit des corps about the whole affair.
At the Mashrabiya a plaster bookseller sits in the foyer of the building that houses the gallery, presiding over a stall that has art works, pigments, herbs, dog ends, all neatly packaged in cellophane and displayed on the stall. His hands, tellingly, seem to be manacled with twisted wire. Presumably this piece was intended to be installed on the pavement but the relevant authorities, more shame to them, withheld the permits for this and other, more ambitious street projects, and so what was originally intended as a street festival has become more gallery bound than the organisers originally intended. It is not their fault and they should not be disheartened. Better luck next time.
In the gallery itself Hermine van Rooy exhibits a series of startling photographs, most of them of herself. Wrapped in gauze, repeated, in some her face assumes the texture of asphalt, in others she is unrecognisable. There are masks of the same face, in one instance four of them, on the floor in front of a suspended photographic image of the same. An initial response, that the show's atmospherics appeal for all the wrong reasons, is quickly killed: this constantly unidentified face, in its many mutations, Pharaonic, iconic, grainy film noire pastiche, eventually proves haunting as the repetition comes to signify nothing beyond an inevitable transitoriness. Hermine van Rooy deftly divests herself of the vanity so often implicit in being the portrait's subject in order to focus on other, more permanent features -- the most permanent, ironically, being the fleeting nature of existence. It is cleverly handled irony, and in twisting the notion this way and that van Rooy emerges with strikingly beautiful images. The pose is resilient, and in the face of so much evidence that it can never be it is strangely heroic.
At Cairo Berlin Youssef Nabil shows recent photographs under the title Secret Side. Of whom, of what? It might be the city -- most of the images are Parisian -- but the most obvious contender is Nabil himself.
These snapshots are assembled into twos or threes. Sometimes the juxtapositions are crude, spring leaves on a branch, green, autumn leaves, russet, on the floor; sometimes formally determined, the horizontal slats of the back of a park bench, green, ventilation ducts, blue, ascending the façade of the Pompidou Centre; sometimes they imply a narrative, the wrought iron entrance to a Paris Metro station, buskers, then a view of the train, or else an oblique commentary, Che Guevara as graffiti, as T-shirt design, and as jacket in the window of a shop, in the corner the credit cards taken. The most successful are the least portentous -- a stall covered in prawns, a mosaic. They at least display a certain visual humour. The rest strive after far too much. A face in the moon, above a card saying ghosts; a row of candles sandwiched between sky and trees and white downy wings: if only one could believe they were meant as a post-modern take on the pastoral, urban or otherwise. They are not. They are just the secret side of someone who has not yet escaped the tiresome vanity of being his own subject.
Townhouse exhibits installations by David d'Agostino, recent work by Mohamed Abu El-Naga, a travelling exhibition, The Vehicle, "picturing moments of transition in a modernising society", an installation, Self Annihilation, by Shadi El-Noshoukati, and photographs by Veronique Audergon.
An almost impossible mix, but curatorial policy at the Townhouse appears increasingly schizophrenic. With so much space to fill, one assumes funding comes to play a rather weighty part.
David d'Agostino's installations, Bureaucracy, Camouflage, Antibiotics, provide a reasonably coherent opening -- scalpels, suspended from the ceiling by wire, stick into small coloured, compressed cardboard squares, allegedly soaked in antibiotics, attached to the walls. The same squares are black and white for Bureaucracy, and presumably not soaked, and sometimes spill on to the floor, otherwise occupied by aluminum pails. For Camouflage they face a wall speckled with dun markings, and a spent artillery shell containing cotton buds. Little else beyond: like so much installation, a conceptual outgrowth, the idea is the thing, or not, as the case might be.
Natheer El-Tanbouli's Familiar Faces, inspired, apparently, by Charles Lamb's poem, consists of outsize wanted posters replete with cartoonish images of his oldest friends, a kind of visual Auld Lang Syne.
The Vehicle, archive photographs from Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Palestine, blown up to poster-sized proportions, is soaked in sepia tinted nostalgia. Camels over the bonnet of a Rolls Royce, boats, cars, women in sixties bobs on the bonnet of a BMW: the recent past, but it couldn't seem further away.
Self Annihilation, a single, palm frond screen, half burned, and a video of the same, burning in the Nile as chimneys belch smoke in the background, and the sun sets, another exercise in installation rhetoric -- the most interesting aside being a white, lacy dress drawn on black board with simulated pearls glued on. And on the top floor, to crown it all, conventional, if competent, black and white portraits of the participants in last year's Aswan sculpture festival, against uniformly black backgrounds.
