15 - 21 February 2001
Issue No.521
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 15 - 21 February 2001 Issue No.521 |
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It's not all in the title
Hani Rashed, Drawings -- a modestly titled exhibition. Do not be fooled by the absence of a tricksy little title, a fashion that these days tends to be employed to lend an aura of poetry to the most prosaic of daubs. The poster is modest, the accompanying post cards modest, and many of the items on show, though by no means all, are small. But the only modest thing about Hani Rashed's work is its price.
Hani Rashed, currently at the Mashrabiya
Three years ago the same artist exhibited at the Atelier, in the small ground floor gallery set aside to showcase new work by artists who could not, with the best will in the world, be described as established. If that show displayed considerable promise, the current Mashrabiya offering represents real achievement.
The creatures that inhabit Hani Rashed's drawings are odd. In many cases they could have emerged from the chrysalis rather than crawled from the womb, and if at times there is a whimsicality about their hybridisation it serves only to reinforce a sense of strangeness that, cumulatively, proves quite overwhelming.
It would be wrong, though, to assume anything folksy about these insect people, or anything remotely naive. And while, in two of the larger pieces, a few endearing bugs float atop an oily sheet of water, the impact is generally far more disturbing. There is humour, yes, but it is grim if only because the sense of neurosis is too palpable to be dismissed.
Some of the merely human figures -- largely by virtue of the attenuated line -- recall Schiele, but only if it is possible to strip the chic from the angst of pre-1914 Vienna. Yet others, the heads attached to thorax, some without limbs, others with spindly, articulated legs, are of the kind that lurk beneath the undergrowth in a Bosch garden. And if the form -- meandering pencil lines, sudden staccato jabs resolving themselves into outlandish shapes -- is essentially illustrative, what is being illustrated is the dark secret at the heart of fairy land. It is a place where butterflies have their wings pulled off, and something sinister does not bother to lie quiet beneath the surface. Amid all this Rashed provides hints of the familiar -- lights that hang, tables, domestic props -- intimated by a few lines and serving as barbs, sharp little fish hooks to catch the attention.
The scale, too, is disorienting: that so many of these images are really enlarged postage stamps lends a sense of claustrophobia. Yet when they break away from this miniaturisation, the white space inhabited is itself oppressive.
The inclusion of text in several drawings -- Roman lettering, but like mirror writing, reversed -- hints at the possibility of narrative. And in truth, on this showing, Hani Rashed should be deluged with commissions to illustrate, though this is unlikely to happen. It was disturbing, too, to notice the absence of red dots. True, these are difficult pieces. Drawn from necessity, like all necessary art they are unlikely to be co-opted by interior decorators. This may not be an easy show, but it is one of the more haunting to have been staged in Cairo for a long time.
No absence of red dots at Safar Khan, where Katherine Bakhoum provides the perfect antithesis to Hani Rashed's concentrated emotion. Here the impulse is clearly decorative and if, on occasion, there is, as well, a hint of Secessionist Vienna, it is of Klimt at his most louche, though in terms of mannered background rather than subject. No kiss, but plenty of gold.
Large figures, characters in lavish Eastern dress, are foregrounded. The secret, though, lies in backgrounds that in some cases incorporate ornate bits of printing and in others are constructed from squares of card pieced together and often overlapping with the figure. A hint of gilding, of stencilled motifs, of decorated fabric or wall paper, and all in perfectly tasteful colours. The faces of these figures, often no more than eyes, nose, eyebrows, peeping from beneath the veil, add a discordant note. Such individualisation is at odds with the abstracted treatment of the rest of the figure. This is yet another orientalist fantasy, a fancy dress party where the costumes matter more than the wearer because they can be manipulated into the overall decorative scheme.
Martin Macinally, three drawings from a series of eight
Up the stairs at Safar Khan is a row of small pieces, many including elements of collage. Here the decorative impulse is at its most obvious. The absence of the human figure frees Bakhoum to do what she is best at, which is a tasteful and really rather calming minimalism. The economy of means is at times Japanese, and it comes as no surprise to find a sheet of printed Chinese characters next to a fan. Elsewhere old letters are incorporated into the pictures, the beautiful copperplate script adding a strangely soothing aspect to these miniature landscapes. It is here that this particular artist's talent appears to lie, the careful, calculated half assemblage, half painting. Katherine Bakhoum should blow up these miniatures and allow them room to breathe.
There are, in addition, a number of triptych-like pieces, each comprising three figures, variously, though never less than extravagantly, costumed, and a couple of images that look as if they are reworkings of old photographs, including a man in a fez, which is a tad old hat. On second thoughts, in the larger pieces, it might be better to take out the figures as well as the faces. For until that happens Bakhoum's strengths will remain in the background, obscured behind a crowd-pleasing Orientalism the ersatz nature of which serves only to set one's teeth on edge.
The Townhouse is showing recent works by Martin Mcinally and, on the first floor, Four Portraits, an installation by David D'Agostino.
The portraits are variously of America, Palestine, Sinai and Iraq. You enter via America -- brightly coloured balloons tacked onto the wall, and lying, some of them burst, on the toothpick strewn floor. Beyond America lies Palestine, red squiggles on the wall, broken bricks strewn across the floor. Some balloons have wafted through from America, which may well be a comment of sorts. Stray balloons, too, appear in Sinai, which otherwise consists of a tangled mass of wire, twisted into tortured arabesques from which hang old shoes and broken flip flops found, we are told, by the artist during a walk north of Dahab. Iraq, the most trite of the four, has eggshells strewn across the floor, and small plastic toys -- dolls, ducks, bright green frogs -- nailed to the wall. It is the one room that, when I visited, did not have any stray American balloons.
There is an artist's statement accompanying the portraits. Art can be made from cheap, disposal materials, it states. Installation is not an imperialist form, it goes on. Nothing to argue with there. Some people dislike my art, D'Agostino laments, because it is made from cheap materials, which is something of a cheap response to the art.
What makes the current installation dislikeable has nothing to do with the materials, nor really with the installation per se, which makes the gallery space look like the aftermath of a party that one would not like to have missed, but which one certainly would not want to have hosted. What is dislikeable is the attempt to accrue portent through the titling. Coopting Iraq and Palestine to give a significant gloss, a hint of something supposedly profound, is the only thing that cheapens this particular piece. Unfortunately, it does so irredeemably.
On the ground floor Martin Mcinally insists that I am everybody and everybody is me. He does so repeatedly in the first gallery, in a series of self-portraits, one of them with wings, another with horns, one white with golden halo, the other black with dark red eyes. And in case we miss the point, from the ceiling hangs a row of banners, each comprising the outline of a life size figure, presumably the artist again. I-am-every-body-and-every-body-is-me -- one word per pendant.
Beyond this first gallery appear reworkings of the architectural plans that were so evident last year in the same artist's Dreams of Atlantis, only this time the pastel swimmers floating above the plans have been replaced by angels, either singly or embracing. If the non-submarine version doesn't quite wring enough changes -- it is, admittedly, difficult to give up on a good idea before milking it completely dry -- the much smaller series of drawings, in the third gallery, of two figures engaged in the precisely choreographed conflict that is wrestling suggests that Mcinally is moving in other directions, and effectively so.
For exhibition details, see Listings
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