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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 - 30 August 2000 Issue No. 496 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 - 30 August 2000 Issue No. 496
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Snakes in the grass
By Nigel Ryan
There has, as far as I am aware, been no mention in the local press of an exhibition that opened in Copenhagen last week of the work of three artists, Mona Hatoum, Ghada Amer and Chant Avedissian.
Mona Hatoum -- a Lebanese artist now resident in London -- is certainly the most famous of the three. She is by now a firmly esconced fixture on the international art scene, a position that inevitably brings with it certain trappings. The obligatory, large format and beautifully produced monograph on her work, published by Phaidon, has been available for some time. She has been short-listed for the Turner Prize, the UK's most prestigious award for contemporary art, and one that is generally accompanied by a great deal of controversy, and her shows attract generous, and usually obliging, press coverage. She has, in short, pitched her base camp on the slopes of Parnassus and become that sometimes most short-lived of creatures, an Important Artist. And if, following her celebrity, a sometimes prurient interest in her doings develops -- she has not, though, courted publicity in the manner, say, as Damien Hirst, another Important Artist to emerge from the Britart scene -- it should prove little more than grist to the mill of an artist who once treated gallery goers to a tour round her own body courtesy of a fibre-optic camera.
Mona Hatoum was a guest at the last Cairo International Biennale, presenting an installation which included a room the walls of which were festooned with metal boomerangs with knife like-blades. The visual metaphor was stark, and easy to read. Violence, once it is unleashed, has a nasty way of returning to its point of origin and harming the perpetrator.
It was reassuring to see Mona Hatoum as a guest of the Cairo Biennale. Too few artists whose reputations have been made in the West -- in Europe or the US -- are welcomed with open arms back home. Hatoum, though, whose reputation is by now as firm as these things can be, is perhaps fortunate in being Lebanese rather than Egyptian.
Ghada Amer is less fortunate. Being born and bred in Alexandria, she is Egyptian. But then she left for France, living in Paris, where her work first began to attract attention, before moving, two years ago, to New York. She lives in Harlem, supports herself exclusively on the proceeds from her work, and has secured rather more than a toe-hold in the notoriously difficult art-scene of that city. Yet she has received surprisingly little attention here in Egypt. An exhibition of small and not necessarily representative pieces at Espace, a couple of years ago, went almost unnoticed.
Amer's choice of subject -- female sexuality, its expression and distortions -- was always going to be problematic for an artist who has remained unwilling to abandon the figurative for the usual gestural, metaphysical claptrap. There is an excruciating figuration in all her work -- needlework (this is women's sexuality after all) -- describing images taken more often than not from pornographic magazines, in one case embroidered on an otherwise pure white wedding dress which revolved slowly on its manequin, skirts billowing, to the tune of the Blue Danube. It is hardly work likely to endear her to the critical establishment in her homeland, and it fits in fairly neatly with expectations abroad where a woman from a "repressively patriarchal" society addressing issues arising from expressions of sexuality is almost guaranteed to attract attention. The fact that the natural constituency for such work in the West, the Judy Chicago embroidered dinner-party feminists, would be themselves alienated by the stock images of Western pornography that Amer uses, adds a layer of further complexity to her work. Yet such complexities have received no critical attention in Egypt. Amer is either ignored, or else the subject of an unpleasant whispering campaign that centres on the portmanteau -- and erroneous -- accusation that she has exhibited in Israel. Forget that she is one of the most interesting Egyptian artists working today, forget the work, her art, its content, merit or otherwise. She is effectively dismissed by unsubstantiated, whispered accusations of treachery.
Chant Avedissian, whose work will be shown at the British Museum in a few months time, and before that in Washington, has also been effectively side-lined by a cultural establishment -- among whom one can include those self-professed dissidents who see themselves as victims of that self same establishment but whose identity would be insupportable were they not vacuum packed in their determined and ineffectual opposition.
Some time ago an Egyptian supplement issued by the London based Arts and the Islamic World, and partly funded by the Cultural Development Fund, was effectively vetoed by the then head of the fund, Samir Gharib, because its cover featured a piece by Avedissian, who was not, apparently, thought sufficiently representative of Egyptian art. Avedissian has shown only rarely in Egypt, the city of his birth, and where he has spent virtually all of his life. But it is hardly surprising, in the face of such attitudes, that he chooses to exhibit almost exclusively abroad. With growing recognition he, too, is likely to be treated with ever-greater suspicion by an art establishment that, observers may be forgiven for occasionally thinking, finds anything that is not second rate far too threatening to acknowledge. Hence the crude but effective attempts at marginalisation -- the latest being the whispered campaign against Ghada Amer, which has nothing to do with her work and, as usual, allows her no opportunities to defend herself.
