18 - 24 April 2002
Issue No.582
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 18 - 24 April 2002 Issue No.582 |
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Insiders outside the mainstream
Marie-Thérèse Abdel-Messih attends the first exhibition of outsider art to be staged by the Ministry of Culture
That outsider art has gained a footing in the Egyptian art world is of great significance. "Outsider art" refers to artefacts produced by creators who have received no formal training in the arts and fall outside the mainstream art world. Lately, outsider art has attracted a large public as mainstream art has lost its hold on most viewers. In Egypt private galleries have for a long time sponsored these creators. Finally, the state has acknowledged untrained creators, and for the first time the Ministry of Culture is holding an exhibition under the rubric "Naïf Art" at the Opera Arts Centre
Galal Huzayyen
Four creators are paid tribute: Abdel-Badee Abdel- Hayy (b. 1916), Mahmoud El-Labban (b.1919), Louis Tewfik (b. 1929), Mohammed Ali (b. 1930), and Hasan El-Sharq (b. 1951). Abdel-Hayy, though, started practicing in the early years of the twentieth century, a time when an "artist" had no practical choice than to follow the academy. His patrons helped him receive formal training in sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, and he eventually became a mainstream artist, so his inclusion here is something of an enigma.
Labban's architectonic incense-burners were discovered by chance in the sixties. Labban had never thought of them as "art" until he was told so. The incense-burners were made for the zikr, Sufi sessions he attended with the Dervishes. When his artefacts were first exhibited in the sixties they initiated a dialogue with the public that did not remain for long. The political changes that took place in the seventies and early eighties shattered the cultural scene, and Labban's work was almost forgotten.
Mohammed Ali's paintings also flourished in the exuberant sixties. Both Labban and Ali reside in the Ghurriyya district of Old Cairo. Ali also worked as a musician, accompanying Sheik Imam, the blind singer. Imam's popular songs countered a clamorous state-oriented media. Labban and Ali challenged the internationalist aesthetics fostered by mainstream art. Labban's plaster chimerical creatures retrieve the primordial that had long been overpowered by the canonical. On the other hand, Ali's paintings are steeped in the daily life of his kinsmen. They combine Islamic symmetry and folkloric animation.
Louis Tewfik obtained first award in the Bratislava Triennial (1994). He was born deaf-and-dumb and received artistic training with an Indian deaf-and-dumb artist in Jerusalem (1945-48). His flow-master drawings form units that stretch out to disclose varied entities, shaping a mythical world. The recurrent motif is a central figure astride a beast whose body comprises entwined human and animal forms. The riding figure may be heading towards one direction, while his shadow or a counter figure is anticipating an opposite destination. The figures are static though they seem to be on the move. The drawings translate the creator's awareness that unity depends on separate but undivided entities. They transmit the creator's delight in belonging while avoiding inclusion.
Hasan El-Sharq started off as a hagg mural painter. He was fascinated by popular ballads, and wanted to participate imaginatively in retelling them in drawing. His narrative compositions are at once representational and abstract. The figures are set within a framework of lines expressive of interrelations binding the communal and phenomenal worlds. Communal life was also the chief preoccupation of Sheik Ramadan Suweilam (1935-98) whose creations were by mischance dropped from the exhibition. He started exhibiting in the eighties and his drawings have been well-received in national and international outsider art galleries and museums. As a Bedouin chieftain his narrative compositions recount fables of legendary Egyptian royalty and Bedouin chivalry.
Although several regions in Egypt are not represented, the exhibition displays a large variety of styles. Some are tied to a narrative tradition, while others are self-referential. Several are reminiscent of tribal artefacts used in pre- industrial societies. Sayed Amin Fayed (b. 1950) is less tied to narrative traditions. He picked stones from the desert and imbued them with a polymorphous existence. When he later tried his hand at drawing, the texture of his creations combined the different techniques: drawing can invoke volume, sculpture make use of line. His creations belong to visionary art that divines beings with a multifarious presence: bird, fish, reptile, beast, and human kind form a unity that translates the essence of being.
Galal Huzayyen (b.1946) discovered his artistic aptitude three years ago. He lives in the Fayoum district, a region rich in Graeco-Roman art, and his creations bear this trace. Huzayyen's creations brought him trouble when one day he found himself arrested on a charge of possessing antiquities. An expert in Greco- Roman art was consulted and the prisoner was proved innocent; the release of the prisoner marked the birth of the creator, who decided to pursue a career in art. Although his figurines bear signs of another world, for Huzayyen they speak of daily problems and predicaments. An animal is half-buried in the sands, revealing and concealing his presence, torn by the desire to show off his endowments, and the fear of being intercepted. A woman is stuffed in a tight fitting boat, her arms dropping helplessly. The boat is meant to carry her to a predetermined destination: the journey undertaken in utter immobility. However, in other creations, a woman has the power to tame a ferocious beast.
Abdou Ramzi (b. 1961) is a blacksmith who has turned his craft into an unusual art. As a blacksmith, iron formed part of his world. Now he is part of a world crowded with iron creations. His objects are figurative, but the details are summarised in order to mystify the commonplace and in the process interpret the commonalty of the mystical.
Zakaria Mohamed Soliman (b. 1970) takes us to a world of childish determination. His paintings have been mostly pervaded by a carefree jocundity, but those exhibited now are focused on the Intifada. The figures stand immutable, sorrow pouring from their heads. For Soliman emotional situations evoke natural feelings; according to him the natural corresponds to primal feelings, or an unsophisticated childhood. In his creations there is no discrimination between child and adult beyond size.
The creations exhibited are by no means exclusive. They are provisional sites in an ongoing process forming an avant-garde movement in Egyptian art. They require that the viewer should play and outplay the role of the critic in order to comprehend the alternative visions of creators. To appreciate the uniqueness of the visual experience the viewer must stand beyond the prescribed boundaries of the mainstream.
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