Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture

		19 - 25 September 2002 Issue No. 604 Culture	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Recommend this page

In the eye of
Well, the beholder. And that's fine, writes Nigel Ryan

Photo Cairo is a tricky one. As an exhibition certainly, or rather as an anthologising of six exhibitions: there is, in the end, only the most accidental of overlaps, which is one of the strengths of the packaging. As an event -- well, we must wait and see. Photo Cairo continues until 9 October and the programme of events -- discussions, screenings of films and video, presentations by the artists of their own work -- looks promising. That these should be such a novelty speaks volumes about Egypt's contemporary art scene.
So for the time being there are the shows: Lara Baladi, Nermin Hammam, Youssef Nabil and Randa Shaath, supplemented by Becoming Van Leo, curated by Negar Azimi, and 1952: Private Collection, a selection of images drawn from that year. And accompanying it all is a 24 page booklet, including a timetable which will help those interested in navigating the month's events. The notes included on individual shows, unfortunately, are likely to prove less helpful: for a critic to complain of pedantry might seem rich, but it's not half so rich as being told that printing photographic images on canvas "blurs any distinction between painting and photography, and furthermore, reveals the historic relationship between the two". Not only is this a patently nonsensical statement -- examine the works in question, by Nermin Hammam, and it requires only a modicum of visual literacy to realise that precisely the opposite is happening, that the distinction between painting and photography is being pointed, not blurred, by the conceit, while the historical relationship between the two is not even intimated -- it does the artist a great disservice. If the desire exists to place the works within such a strait-jacketed polemic, and it is an often dubious desire at best, then do the artist the courtesy of looking at what is being strait-jacketed. It would be churlish, though, to harp on only about such misrepresentations. Enough to suggest that if such commentary is to be privileged it must be based on what is there and not on what so clearly is not.
Otherwise, Nermin Hammam offers a succinct reading of a kind of ecstasy, at times valedictory, at times, as in the crucifixion triptych, with more than a whiff of sadomasochism. Inspire, written across the bottom of the left panel, is barely legible; the genuflexion and facial expressions of the figures beneath the central cross are far less enigmatic.

Untitled, Nermin Hammam

Such transfigurations are common artistic currency: that Hammam has selected the mulid as her favourite site to record such experiences begs rather more questions about the politics of representation than otherwise might be the case, and the half- lighting of the show, the shrouding of some rooms in gloom, conceivably an attempt at atmospherics, serves also to underline the voyeuristic nature of the enterprise. Similarly, the superimposition of grids across the surface of several images acts less to fix the moment that is being recorded than to suggest the impossibility of fixing the experience of that moment. And if the manipulation of occasional images can seem at times heavy- handed, this barely detracts from the overall impact. The suspicion lurks that should Hammam ever be given a more neutral space (she seems always to be in the Townhouse's rough-hewn upper storeys) such creases as needed it would be ironed out, those that didn't foregrounded.
Youssef Nabil occupies the ground floor of the Townhouse proper and shows signs of developing a sense of humour. There is a Self-Portrait with Laila Elwy, her name, hand printed, forming the backdrop. Actress, hand on ample hips, fingernails like talons, the usual, predatory glare in endless denial that sex symbols come with a sell-by date; the photographer, back to camera, is next to her. Both are dressed in black. As an exercise putative self-effacement it constitutes a reasonably neat visual pun: the photographer's is the largest image.
Move on to Hoda Lutfi, sitting on a chair, dressed in men's clothes, her hair cropped short with locks of the stuff scattered over the floor, wearing an expression that would have made Radclyffe-Hall proud, at least on the days when she got out of the wrong side of bed. There is, too, an effective portrait of Lara Baladi -- one of those occasional overlaps that punctuate this exhibition -- standing on a sofa. Behind is a kitschy nude, at her feet a row of bald mannequin heads. She is wearing satin, at least I think that it's satin, and her hair is in schoolgirl bunches. Ghada Amer provides an equally sympathetic model and one of the most telling images, with back to camera. Otherwise, it is all business as usual: Pierre and Gilles; fey, impossibly sanitised homo-eroticism employing half-naked young men; the famous and the almost famous awarded the usual Nabil treatment. The ersatz once more gains the upper (second) hand. Thankfully, the anecdotal, the Innocence Protectors of previous shows, appear to have been abandoned, leaving room for a few more hits rather than misses.
Nabil is a convincing glamour photographer, a genre that hardly seems capable of containing his ambitions, though at times the ambivalence to what he does best appears wantonly dismissive. But oh how we bridle against the hierarchy of genre, oh how our post-modernism slips. And the result can be characterised as a reactionary form of kitsch, which I mean in an old-fashioned, in a precisely Greenbergian sense. If this is something to play against it is something that must first be acknowledged, one way in which the booklet polemics might have helped. But the most direct way forward, I think, is to tell a few more jokes. The funniest, invariably, are at your own expense, though God Saves us All, a life-belt dangling in an ambiguous space, is a creditable start.
There is far less slippage with Lara Baladi, due largely, though not exclusively, to the fact that the artist remains as subject, even when disguised as a doll -- it is, after all, a disguise she has worn before. And so, in the installation occupying the Townhouse's largest space, the doll engages in an endless cycle of reproduction. At times she is balletic, at times she goose-steps, endlessly giving birth, ejecting babies simply to make room for more, impossibly nimble, improbably fertile, round and round the unwieldy space which is here used to effect. The images are X-rayed, back-lit, suspended in mid-air, a vicious circle, whatever the religious referents, and sometimes psychedelic. It is a savage take on early photographic experiments to record movement -- think only of Muybridge's innocent horses and acrobats. That kind of positivism, so deeply rooted in the 19th, in the century in which photography was born, long went awry. Here it is again subverted, and without end.
Al-Fanous El-Sehry is supplemented by Larabesque Aroussa Baladi, "two sets of prints that exist", -- the booklet again -- "in opposition to one another". One set of prints, unfortunately, appears to have been withdrawn: it was absent at the opening, and absent two days later, the set in question being "an intimate view of feminine cycles, a self-representation by the artist that addresses the construct of the internal, the sacred, and the tangible".
The absence is a great shame. At the last Cairo Biennale, the Ministry of Culture's showpiece event, Tracey Emin not only exhibited masturbatory drawings but received the special jury prize for doing so: what is good for the public gander might, one suppose, apply equally to the private gosling. That this is not the case has never been a secret, though it is worth highlighting the vulnerability of places such as the Townhouse, and decrying the mechanisms that ensure such vulnerability remains in place.
Little slippage, too, with Randa Shaath, though the sure- footedness is achieved by a strategy opposite to that employed by Baladi, for Shaath seems almost obsessive in neutralising her presence. She provides one of the clearer statements of intent, and if this reads like a post-event rationalisation, a means of understanding and of unifying a considerable body of photographic work, well then so is history: nothing more, though it might occasionally be less. Shaath's work, ostensibly documentary, gains immeasurably in exhibition, when the possibility to explore conceptual and graphic overlaps becomes possible. And what emerges, despite the repeated attempts at removal, is a palpably sympathetic presence.
Neither Becoming Van Leo, nor 1952: Private Collection, should benefit from being housed in the long defunct and crumbling Viennoise Hotel, though the curators of both have made a stab at justification, almost in parentheses. The "miniature maze of rooms", though, really does fail "to recall the era in which Van Leo was perhaps most successful". The doorless loos, the palpable decay, would have made the late, and preciously fastidious photographer, run a mile. But here he is, in snapshot, Van Leo wearing hats, a turban, a pith helmet; Van Leo in kimono and lipstick, in the Japanese Garden in Helwan; Van Leo with languid companions, the snapshots introduced via larger, blown-up images, Van Leo wearing soft-furnishings, Van Leo being Van Leo. The campiness is touching, and if this is the thinner end of the wedge of the Van Leo industry, the incongruity of the surroundings, rather than recalling the photographer's hey-day, lends it pathos. These, alongside the seemingly arbitrary collection of portraits, group and individual, that comprise 1952: Private Collection, return to haunt.
The Viennoise, finally, turns up trumps: having gathered the random, as a curbstone gathers leaves, it lends them greater resonance, and amid the decay the throwaway gains a sometimes suffocating density. In introducing Photo Cairo, the organisers insist that they "hope to convey how democratic a tool the camera is". Of course it is not, not here, not anywhere. In the Viennoise, though, it becomes possible, momentarily, to believe it might be.

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