26 April - 2 May 2001
Issue No.531
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 April - 2 May 2001 Issue No.531 |
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Piecing the Biennale puzzle
Nur Elmessiri strolls through the Centre of Art and the Gezira Arts Centre, clutching her catalogue
The Eighth Cairo International Biennale is important. It is, as Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni's statement in the monumental, expensively (though not meticulously) produced Biennale catalogue stresses: "the first international initiative seeking to consolidate the dialogue of art and culture in the new millennium. This year's event is staged in an atmosphere rich with revolutionary developments and breakthroughs in Informational Technology. There is hardly little doubt that art and culture are not left behind. It is now of a paramount importance to pursue the dialogue between world's artists, critics and intelligensia to overcome obstacles ahead. It is also of key importance that the dialogue is staged at the birthplace of mankind's first civilisation."
The Eighth International Cairo Biennale: Facts and figures
Guests of honour: Peter Weibel (Austria); Pietro Consagra (Italy); Fabrizio Plessi (Italy); Carl-Henning Pedersen (Netherlands); George Bahgory (Egypt); Saleh Reda (Egypt)
Jury members: Daniel Georges Abadie (France), Jury president; Gioia Mori (Italy); Rafael Sierra (Spain); Rosa Martinez (Spain); Martina Corgnati (Italy); Salima Hashmi (Pakistan); Ahmed Morsi (Egypt)
Prize-winning works: Moatazz Nasr (Egypt), Grand Prize; José Luis Pajares (Spain); Najand Saheila (Netherlands); Medhat Shafiq (Egypt); Mansoora Hassan (Pakistan); Marina Nunez (Spain); Alex Chellew (Chili); Reem Hassan (Egypt); Youssef Abdelke (Syria); Fatma Ismail (Egypt); Tracy Emin (Britain); Jeffrey Haines (USA)
Mine Biret Tavman (Turkey); Ricardo Longhini (Argentina); Halim Kerim (Netherlands); Remko Posthuma (Netherlands)
130 artists, from 51 countries are taking part in the 8th International Cairo Biennale
Proud Egypt is to "deepen its reputation worldwide," to quote Head of the Fine Arts Sector Prof. Dr. Ahmed Nawar, who, like Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, highlights the fact that this is "the first cultural and art event in the new millennium". Egypt, he continues, is shouldering a "responsibility [that] is constantly growing bigger to consolidate our achievements."
Obstacles notwithstanding, the show did go on. Between the Centre of Art and the Gezira Centre alone the numbers are astounding: over 50 artists (each exhibiting up to four works) representing 19 countries.
In the Italian wing at the Centre of Art rows of Egyptian clay urns on a plinth face television screens showing clay urns -- and the sound of water falling. The inanimate, thanks to technology cleverly deployed by Fabrizio Plezzi, comes to life, and movement is intimated by sound. Masculinity is subverted in Luigi Billi's dark male silhouettes holding lanterns, scissors and fans by turns, as is visual perception in a series of convex metallic surfaces by Emilio Leofreddi on which are painted female profiles with bandages across the eyes and in which the viewer gets a glimpse of herself. Across this latter group of works, words: in Italian and in Arabic, words about seeing, words about perception, words about words. A mystical manifesto accompanies Ivan Barlafante's conceptual Da-Vincesque series two rooms down: Einstein peers through a glass bubble, an indentation in a pillow proclaims that I am here, medieval hermetic renditions of constellations echo the shape of atomic energy -- all to serve the lofty cause of "OVERCOMING THE DUALISM OF LANGUAGE EXISTING BETWEEN EMPIRICAL DIMENSION AND THOUGHT IN ORDER TO ANALIZE (sic) THE MANIFESTATION OF 'ENTIRETY' THROUGH SENSES AND MIND."
But the Italian wing is not only philosophical: there are, also, works that foreground medium, and are less preoccupied with conceptual matters. Textile totems by Luce Delhove, triptychs utilising hand carved wood and gold leaf by Mario Biason, paintings by Guiseppe Modica that lyrically toy with architectural surfaces (in particular windows), felicitously positioned within the gallery space to echo their theme, and an elegant, powerful triptych by Sandro Sanna: golden triangles and pyramidal shapes on a coal black background -- a work which is not in the least bit tricksy and yet manages to transport the viewer to somewhere where there is incense and chanting, possibly Greek orthodox.
Up the stairs, beyond a piano perched on a platform (not an installation, but a permanent feature of the Centre), is where the strange, semi-human sound is coming from. Something reddish on a TV screen lunges forward then recedes, something pumping and breathing -- a human heart. Except it is a punching bag. A woman wearing a boxing glove endows it with movement and energy. In the same room as this video work by Joel Bartolomeo (France), beyond the partition, things are less heavy, are Fauvist and joyful. We are in Mauritius. Colours galore, sunshine, musicians and dancers: paintings by Nahini Treebhoobun, Said Ariff Hossanee, Mario Ng and Salim Currimjee -- and impossibly elegant fantastical birds sculpted from found parts by Dharmadeo Hurry.
The same floor hosts paintings from the Netherlands (by Rob Birza) of masks: ET, African, Ensor, carnivalesque Low Country grotesques, playful and somewhat nightmarish; prize-winning, carefully drafted drawings of parts of fish from Syria (by Youssef Abdelke); and an installation from the Czech Republic (by Milan Cais). A purple inflatable mummy lies in a quiet dark room. Intriguing that the entrance to this room is blocked-- a sense of transgression is intimated, a sense of something holy and prohibited. Except this is not always the case. On other days, one can gain access to the room and the mummy -- thanks to technology -- comes to life. But not today.
Out in the garden Chilean Marcela Maraga's bed-plus-bits-of-shipping-crate installation sits amidst collages, also Chilean (by prize-winning Alex Chellew) of old railway photographs set in geological formations, while Austrian Eva Wohlgemuth's Gaia-like computer graphic Woman -- in Bodyscan -- spins to eerie sci fi music, "jealous that this derwish breathing put my plastic unit into ecstasy." Meanwhile Voice Off, "a two channel video and sound installation" by Judith Barry (USA) "explores how the voice might be represented visually." A man on the projection screen is sitting at his computer screen, writing. He hears sounds coming from behind the wall/screen. Walk through the flap in the screen and on its flip side is projected a loud, cacophonic, babbling mostly-women dream like sequence. Barry's Voice Off, the extensive write-up at the entrance states, "evokes the fugitive nature of speech in being held accountable for inference and implications in the fragmented and fractured human discourse and conversations of everyday life." Oh, that explains things. Art is long -- and life, brief.
The basement proves as eclectic, as rich and varied as the other parts of the Centre of Art. Vegetal variations bursting with energy from Spain (Dario Basso) compete with mixed media works including one titled Homeless, also from Spain (Dario Villalba), and with elegant black and white prints by Juan L Baroja of graceful forms -- totems, ankhs, sceptres, bird-like flora. The prize-winning video by Fatma Ismail (Egypt), Windows, recalls the windows upstairs -- except, thanks to the medium itself, here things move, are accompanied by sound. The final sequence, of shutters opening out of a monolith to the accompaniment of a Vangelis composition incorporating Sufi music, is testimony that art does know how to speak for itself, does not require an extensive explanation pasted (confusingly) on the wall to communicate its intent.
Also in the basement, prize winning creatures from science fiction by Mario Nunez, mannerist, cleverly executed if perspective still be considered a challenge, emerge from the floor, and at the entrance of one of the inside rooms -- the Innersphere by Christopher Hinterhuber (Austria) from the ceiling of which pink balloons are suspended and in which a lonely tape recorder produces eerie sounds -- a write-up announces that "Hinterhuber installs optical Dolby systems, which invasively swallow the observer in surround mode... transforming him in such a way that he becomes able to aesthetically, ie perceivingly, stratify the digital revolution of culture and his own position in it as mediatized subject." Thanks C H. Across, Franz Vana (Austria) has subverted the notion of high art by covering four walls of the 8th International Cairo Biennale with graffiti (German, alas, and without translation). Next door are metallic sculptures, resembling oversize mutant insects, constructed from industrial leftovers by Bjorlo Per Inge (Norway).
Annoying at first, terribly so if you have just about had it with painting masquerading as mysticism, installation as philosophy, is the prize-winning installation by José Luis Pajares. But the sound of water, the water itself, is calming, and something piques your curiosity. Very elaborate -- but certainly not high-tech, in the end a boyish construction -- tin machinery-cum-irrigation-system at the centre of the room is the Cause; the Effect, a projected image of hands, an eye, a face on the wall, and then water rippling across, blurring, disappearing. Annoying at first that someone has taken all that trouble to do something that Nature (or the Almighty) does all the time -- and effortlessly. Annoying, too, that an elaborate bureaucratic system and money has been pumped into this thing, enabling it to cross oceans and land in airports. After irritation comes a combination of a sense of awe vis-a-vis the terribly graceful and, dare one say it?, miraculously efficient machinery of the natural world, and a bemused sense of compassion for man-the-clumsy-amateur-maker -- and, before leaving the Centre of Art for the Gezira, a sense of gratitude that someone has taken that trouble to reawaken in you a sense of philosophic wonder about de rerum natura.
At the Gezira things are slightly less eclectic. Possibly because, unlike at the Centre of Arts, the space here is neutral and modern. No decorative wall paintings, no grand staircases or pianos, no Nile view, and the floors are not wooden and do not creak. Here there is something of a theme, or a set of themes. The human body -- the infinite variety of hands, feet and grimaces, the uncanny resemblance between newly borns and old age, gender as a social construct, the fe/male form -- seems to be one of the central preoccupations of quite a few of the paintings from Turkey (Ferhat Ozgun, Hatie Biginder), Tunisia (Fawzy Al-Chitwi), Russia (Anton Smirnsky), Peru (Hugo Alegro, Francisco Vilchez, Maria Cecilia Lostauna, Lia Patricia Valdina). Ethnicity makes an appearance in the Turkish prize-winning textilic jeu d'esprits by Mine Biret Tavman, in the stunning colours of Alex Gustavo's paintings of the Peruvian paysage and in the calligraphic engravings of Tunisia's Hatem Al-Gharbi. There are, too, at the Gezira Centre abstract, formal works -- by Britain's Patricia Milln and Tunisia's Rachid Fakhfakh.
The problematic relation between art-production and the environment is tackled in the sculpture of Ricardo Longhini (Argentina) and the mixed media works of Fazilet Karnka (Turkey). Longhini's tree trunk sprouts scissors, nemesis of the cut and paste art world. Mommy, where does paper come from? From trees of course. So we kill trees to make pictures of trees? We do dear. The ghost of a tree emerges from Karnka's canvas, aesthetic more than menacing; still, the point is well taken. Things are tamer, and lovelier, in Argentian Juan José Cambre's abstract series hinting at something photosynthetic, dappled and rippling: light filtering through leaves way on high. And in the darkened El-Hussein Fawzi Room, Croatian Mirjana Vodopija's three boxes house shiny wiry shapes, capture a constellation here, an electron there. A soothing room this where, as in a day at the zoo when you have seen one mammal too many, the Reptile House can provide a calming antidote.
We have seen much on the way, have travelled far and wide. So what was the lesson about? The last room at the Gezira, the Kamal Khalifa gallery, is a classroom. Or so, in conjunction with the rows of wooden tables and wooden chairs, the maps of the world on the walls suggest. But look closely at the maps, which at first glance seem canonical and authoritative Atlas maps and all is topsy turvy. The puzzle comprised of country shapes in different colours can be put together, Peter Weibel (Austria) shows us in his installation, in fun ways. Egypt can be North of Alaska, Venezuela can neighbour Denmark. India and Pakistan need not share borders. In this Biennale room who can say whether China is in the East and England in the West or the other way around? Six maps -- recognisably of the world we live in, each different, new worlds. Mirthful possibilities suddenly open up. And the tables? Are they for lessons -- or meals? Someone is hungry. There is nothing on the table. The world need not look as it does.
How to synthesize this variety? Is there a theme? And to what purpose? Thankfully, the Biennale Manifesto drafted by Commissaire-General Ahmed Fouad Selim -- especially in its closing paragraph -- provides a explanation: "Now, is it not true that the machine is itself a body possessing an energetic soul? Is it not true that the duality of machine and mechanism is bound to the energy of technology? And this is the same relationship that the spirit has to the body. Is this a substitute process for the incorporated trilogy [body, soul, spirit], which binds us to the timeframe and the support network of nihilism? Will art answer our questions? The aim of the 8th Cairo International Biennale is to attempt answers to some of these questions."
Youssef Rakha seeks out Egyptian contributions to the biennale at the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art
The Museum of Modern Egyptian Art within the Opera House grounds, not surprisingly, houses one of the largest selection of Egyptian art offered by the Eighth International Cairo Biennale (continuing till 15 May). As interesting as it is arbitrarily curated, the Egyptian work takes up, among other spaces, the entire ground floor. Other sizeable selections -- notably from Cyprus, Pakistan and Bahrain -- occupy much of the first and second floor. The present arrangement reflects the gargantuan magnitude and qualitative unpredictability of the Biennale as a whole.
Alas, with Ministry of Culture officials, journalists and the Biennale crowd charging tenaciously at art works and clueless staff members alike, something in the museum's essential quietude is shattered. Security cameras stand out, and despite the inexplicable, carefree giggles resounding upstairs, there is a slightly ominous sense of being under surveillance.
Immediately upon entry one becomes aware of a barely audible but constant buzzing sound. It never ceases. The sound is so inescapable, so purposefully engineered, one is initially inclined to believe it is part of some hitherto unseen installation. Yet after a thorough tour of the whole museum, the installation in question cannot be located.
Much of the work presented here induces the same kind of uncertainty: the viewer can never be sure if it is mere chance or artful premeditation that brought about particular qualities -- in the art, the choice to include it or the decision to place it here rather than there. One Egyptian example: Vahan Telpian's installation comprises bulky partitions made to look like rocks, stray photographs, pages of text -- sometimes accompanied by diagrams -- scribbled in the artist's hand, and a museum-style display. Yet if not for the markedly higher temperature and humidity of the room and the omnipresent sound of water gushing out a pipe seemingly hidden somewhere inside the partitions -- perhaps the reason for the humidity? -- the installation as a whole would not have been very memorable.
Scattered around all three floors is the usual retinue of contemporary art. George Bahgory, a Biennale guest of honour, exhibits a selection of large paintings from recent exhibitions including the humorous self-portrait in the manner of Rembrandt firs exhibited in the Picasso Gallery.
Diaa' El-Din Dawood -- whose trademark contorted limbs, gigantic gaping jaws and unearthly horns were a fixture of the 1990s scene -- has evidently transcended the human body's external surface, plunging headlong into an ever more repulsive realm of genitalia and concentrating on the dynamics of reproduction, the warping of which he takes on board.
Medhat Shafiq, who received a Biennale Prize, professes an evocation of spiritual life and the realm of ghosts, employing sand, fabric, gauze and suspended cardboard saucers with sketches hanging above them.
Alcatel Prize recipient Reem Ahmed Hassan's "White freedom Black masses -- Ink on paper, different materials" is a complex installation in black and white, literally, down to the nondescript cage-like structures in which wedding and mourning veils are alternately placed. Long rolls of paper display a jumble of text and pictures, partly or wholly blotched. Enhanced with visual references to Hitler, Hiroshima and the slave trade, Hassan's political message is not subtle. "The word postmodern" (as one line of text reads) is knowingly, self-consciously demonstrated.
The ancient Egyptian connection betrays a yearning for "civilisation," a prehistoric -- and irredeemable? -- condition of happiness. Moataz El-Safti's compilation "Back to civilisation -- wood and mixed media" comprises little more than contemporary decorative variations on an ancient Egyptian theme, however. Gamal Gad Meleika created a hanging pyramid made out of gently swaying gilded squares, inscribed with incomprehensible symbols.
On the ground floor, the prehistoric yearning takes on a less rigidly ancient Egyptian guise, although both of the artists in question (Mohyieddin Hussein and Esmat Dawestashi) created pyramids, the latter opting for a deep burgundy surface decorated with pink swirls and cut up by two-dimensional androgynous figures in bright colours, not unlike those that appear in mediaeval textbooks of anatomy. Dawestashi also provides 29 stone heads and an emblematic, stone-age granite wheel. Each of the heads is crowned with a copper diamond shape and propped on a wooden block with a seam of red spots down the middle and a blue shoe in front of it on the floor -- a strategy of display that soon turns into a pointless distraction.
His smaller, vaguely Mayan pyramid aside, Hussein supplies elegant lotus columns and two-dimensional, life-size figures evocative of mummies, three of which are wedged into half-cylinders that look somewhat like tree trunks hollowed out and cut down the middle for the purpose.
The ground floor resembles a prehistoric cave incorporating elements of Egyptian folklore and Mesoamerican art. But the cave is too contrived and too aware of itself as art to inspire fascination. Notwithstanding all that the Biennale offers, we remain, it seems, as far as ever from "civilisation."
(For exhibition details, see Listings)
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