22 - 28 March 2001
Issue No.526
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 22 - 28 March 2001 Issue No.526 |
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Skating on ice
Not quite an overview. Nigel Ryan skirts venues Downtown
Is it thin? Well no, it's not thin. And the coverage is extensive. All Downtown, in fact, from the Italian Consulate to the Greek Club, and taking in, on the way, a variety of landmarks, from Estoril, haunt of the bibulous, to Groppi's, until recently almost exclusively the haunt of the sad. Galleries, of course, are included, though it is telling that they are among the least exciting venues, which should please the directors of the Townhouse, Mashrabiya and Espace, since they organised the event.
From catalogue accompanying Shadi El-Noshokaty's installation
It is exciting, certainly, to gain access to spaces that would normally be closed and, on first acquaintance, should also be condemned. The Viennoise hotel, on the corner of Mahmoud Bassiouni (formerly Antikhana) and Champollion is one such space, currently occupied -- haunted would be a better term -- by Lara Baladi. She has had the grace to let the space do the talking, and if what it whispers is hard to catch this is hardly Baladi's fault.
The Viennoise is crumbling. The rooms of the hotel are gutted. The carpet, where there is carpet, is caked in dust. Corridors are suddenly barricaded with an assemblage of wooden bits and pieces, crates, planks, bits of plywood, nailed together any old how. And beyond the makeshift barrier, the corridor continues in unilluminated gloom, and then turns, a corner beyond which we cannot navigate though, like Alice before the looking glass, we can surmise that the spaces we cannot see are very much like the spaces through which we have just passed. This final terminus, the wooden barrier, is illuminated by a plastic doll, two feet high, and carrying a lamp in its pudgy plastic hand.
There is a photograph, in one of the earliest rooms, of a figure in belly dancing costume, the kind of tacky-extravagant thing sold in Khan Al-Khalili. She is photographed against the wall where she is hung, so there is continuity, yes, no break in image and background, but also an absolute contradiction between this image, the rather heartening human endeavor, and the desolation of the setting. You know the photograph was taken here, recently, that this room was inhabited by the subject, the photographer, lights and camera, but this knowledge cannot disturb the dust that blankets everything. Dust is the condemned urban equivalent of snow, or sand. A desert, and irretrievably so at this stage of the Viennoise hotel's history.
Baladi has painted signs on the walls. A green man running here and there, meticulous graffiti elsewhere. FIGHT, in red letters, can easily be missed in one corridor, though I NEVER GIVE UP, in gold, in one of the better illuminated rooms, is less easy to pass by. A doll hangs above the broken sink in another room, still in its plastic bag, turquoise hair, sparkling latex cycling shorts, fluffy white jacket. In yet another room a postcard sized photograph of a newly married couple gathers dust, again over the sink.
There is, too, a large photographic panel, snapshot sized images pieced together to create an enormous collage. It is inhabited by the ghosts of the objects that inhabit the rooms, only they are played, in this photographic representation, by real people. The doll is there, or its life-sized equivalent, photographed and thus reduced, no more real than the plastic figure in its polythene bag. Several comic strip super heroines strut across the panel, striking poses with their plastic laser swords on the crumbling fire-escape, or else displaying attitude, in their cartoon coloured clothes, all dazzling primaries, in the drab rooms through which the spectator has just wandered. But these snapshots are Baladi's only real imposition on the space, and even if they are pieced together into a large panel they remain only snapshots.
And there we go. This space could not have found a more unassuming artist, and by being so unassuming Baladi approaches something so close to the elegiac that it might well be the same.
Slightly further down Mahmoud Bassiouni, in a third floor apartment, things are less cohesive. The hallway is filled with Hani Rashed's improbable insects, with pearlised eyes, grins, butterfly hair clips serving as antennae. At night you do not realise that they are crawling out of the windows and up the walls. They hang on strings from the ceiling, dangling in mid air, an infestation that gradually becomes malevolent regardless of the grins.
Further down the corridor, behind a curtain, a housewife is being interviewed, a television screen in the corner of the black painted, claustrophobic space, focusses variously on the mass of bric-a-brac on sitting room shelves and then cuts to the housewife in question. The walls of the tiny space are covered with back-lit transparencies of the housewife in situ, in her very own environment, not here, in the temporary gallery, but at home, in the kitchen.
Competing with the discussion of housework, and far away from theorising about domestic chores, comes the soundtrack from the cupboard-like space next door. Brian Eno, Ambient Music for Airports, barely modulated, minimal. And in the room? A suitcase. Outside the room? An air ticket, in a pouch removed from the suitcase. This is Karthik Pandian's terminal, and its presence next to the housewife being interviewed was one of those fortuitous juxtapositions that lends a modicum of humour to a festival that seems, at times, determined not to smile.
In the same apartment is Rehab El-Sadek, though for some reason she is not mentioned on the programme leaflet. A pyramid of cubes, bearing various texts inscribed on fabric stands in the centre of the floor. Behind, projected on the wall, is a video of a face, close-up, and chewing gum. The connections are not at all obvious, though there is almost certainly some commentary being made about the commodification of culture, the reduction of heritage -- the inscribed extracts are mostly from ancient texts -- to insubstantial candyfloss or gum. In compensation for the lack of cohesion, though, is the actual manufacture of the contents of this room. Rehab El-Sadek has never been an artist to stint on detail.
Everyone must have a go -- installation is the great leveller since all you need is a space and some things to put in it, or so it seems at the Gresham hotel. This is the most unwieldy of the venues, a corridor of hotel rooms like battery units, one room per artist, do with it what you will. Halfway down, though, in this the most humourless Nitaq space and a smile is raised. In the centre of the room a coffin, and in the centre of the coffin a red LCD display. IT IS NOW SAFE TO SWITCH OFF YOUR COMPUTER blinks through the dark. It is only a newspaper cartoon, concretised, but that, here at least, was something.
This is a skate, across ice that in places does begin to feel thin, though that is no excuse not to venture out in the first place. And a perfectly reasonable place to start is the Townhouse. The largest of the three organising galleries, it is hosting work by Amina Mansour, Hassan Khan, Mona Marzouk, Shadi El-Noshokaty and Wael Shawky.
On opening night there was an undoubted buzz at the Townhouse, though it was a little too crowded to actually see anything. Elbowing through the crowds around Shadi El-Noshokaty's show, though, hardly does it justice. You have until Saturday to catch this peculiarly disjointed, at times surprisingly moving, recollection of the artist's grandmother. Enter through a polythene maze, on which are hung photographs, with brief texts, of rooms. Rows of chairs shrouded with dust cloths, a great deal of floral repeat fabric, and a level of dereliction that recalls the Viennoise. This, presumably, is grandmother's house. Move then into a room that inexplicably contains a monumental rectangle of monumental bars of soap out of which grow cacti, prickly pears I think. And then through a curtain, into a third room, in the centre of which are six of the chairs that appear in the photographs, at the windows of which are hanging the floral repeat curtains from the photographs. Family members talk about grandmother on a video loop. They talk about washing her after her death -- a reason for the soap here, maybe, but not reason enough. Death drags the most cloyingly banal statements into excruciating relief. Having been turned into an unwitting voyeur, there is no get out clause in decrying the sentimental. The chairs in the centre of the space, before the screen, were undoubtedly sat upon by the woman that everyone behind is grieving, they provide a very concrete catch for that grief. And leaving, the photographs assume greater resonance, become, indeed, quite haunting. The pile of soap and cacti, on the other hand, remains an ugly intrusion.
On the top floor of the gallery -- perhaps it had to happen -- is the discursive statement. "The moulid is a stereotypical image of Egyptian society that encompasses all its coexisting contradictions without allowing any of its poles to affect the other negatively or positively." A firm statement, that -- it comes at the end of a barrage of similar statements -- and not particularly true. Still, plunge in, to the bitumen covered rooms. A film is being screened beyond the bitumen covered barrier, Sufi dancers, doing that Sufi sway, stereotypical so far, and as soundtrack the most obvious choice you can imagine, streetwise, African American. This, one must presume, is one of those "coexisting contradictions." And everything is covered in bitumen, the walls, floors, ceilings. The walls have had little windows built into them, all of them closed, all covered in bitumen. On opening night you stuck to the floor. Later in the week walking was smoother.
Many people loved this installation, that was part of the buzz of opening night. I find Salvador Dali trite. I found this more trite. Not that there is any necessary connection. Just pity the people who have to clean up Wael Shawky's extravaganza.
Hassan Khan's video installation, Reading the Surface: 100 faces, 6 locations, 25 questions, I enjoyed. But save the ground floor of the Townhouse till last. Wander through Mona Marzouk's pastel silhouettes, past her plywood, white painted minaret -- heritage here takes yet another bow -- and into Amina Mansour's two rooms. Are they hats, these frothy constructions of loofah, spun fibre, wool and silk thread? In one room they sit in cases, one per case, two cases in the room. In the other they are on the wall, one per case, two cases in all mounted on two walls. This is The Twin's Domain, we are told. Amid all this froth, this macabre wedding hat frippery, the solid oak carved washbasin appears even more solid. The taps actually work -- they turn, dry. The hats themselves (though they are not really hats), are fun fun fun, at first, then disconcerting. This is all there is. Four hats. A washstand. And it is all there needs to be.
For Nitaq festival details, see Listings
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