Issue No. 610
Culture
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31 Oct. - 6 Nov. 2002 Issue No. 610 Culture |
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Fable's magic potion
Marie-Thérèse Abdel-Messih finds greater resonance in the absence of demarcation
As part of the Goethe Institute's "Fable and Magic Festival" Hassan El-Shark (b 1951), an outsider artist from Zawiyat Sultan, a village near Minya, is holding a drawing exhibition in black and coloured ink, curated by Ursula Schernig. Included are series of drawings representing images from The Thousand and One Nights, from the Isis and Osiris legend, in addition to scenes from the zikr ritual, a collective rhythmical dance performed to exorcise evil spirits.
In the creator's imagination life and legend are interwoven by equal modes of representation, the legendary figures represented indistinguishable from ordinary villagers. Women goddesses or villagers are configured as life providers throughout the ages; whether in interiors or exteriors, enclosed or in open space, woman is all-pervasive. In Isis and Osiris she re-members the body of the dismembered spouse, god of fertility and eternal lover. In The Thousand and One Nights she re-tells the fable to redeem the spouse, the master, former gladiator, thus saving his soul and protecting her body. In the zikr ritual she is the kudiyya, the exorcist that can free the body from the jinn inhabiting the soul.
The Thousand and One Nights series is mostly in tones of brown, the compositions framed by arched swords linking the disparate, usually interior scenes. The space is filled with details that evoke the mood of the scenes represented. The Isis and Osiris representations are set outdoors, the flora and fauna acting as living elements and symbols of regeneration. Representations of exorcism or magic ritual comprise crystal balls, disparate letters forming sacred or secular texts, and secret numbers of esoteric significance. The rotundity of the crystal ball is analogous to the wholeness of the female figure, often represented as a solid mass poised on solid ground. Significantly, the crystal ball and the female figure are life-givers, determinants of man's life to come.
Throughout his 15-year career as an artist Hassan has always been fascinated by the cultural and natural environment surrounding him, whether experienced or re-told, organic or inorganic. The touch of life is materialised by the breath of the spirit: this is the essence of folk religion, a faith that admits no divisions between secular and spiritual, between the quotidian and ritual.
Likewise, an untrained folk imagination can never be bound by styles categorised by highbrow art historians and related to fixed historical phases. Folk imagination is animated by the creator's ability to trace a connection between form and feeling, such that divisions between the animate and inanimate, the physical and metaphysical, disappear. The plastic representation abstracting life experience is thus strongly connected to the visual perception of the environment and its related forms. Changes in the linear or compositional features in the art history of a certain location may vary in response to predominant ideologies: they can, though, never totally escape the imaginative formations of a collective unconscious.
Not that the outsider creator is hostage to the fatalism of the given, or to a collective unconscious. Indeed, in folk religion, fatalism may lurk in the irrational faith in external uncontrolled forces, but it is not a negative faith. There is also faith in the strength of the will to row, like the zealous fisherman, against the tide, to re-member the body like Isis, the willful spouse, to re-tell the fable like Sheherazade the gifted storyteller.
To believe in life is to believe in the tale re-told about it, belief being an act of solidarity between the creator who represents and the viewer re-constructing the fable. The exhibition's inauguration ceremony could even have led us to believe that mental re-construction may activate the body. The zikr ritual, represented in the drawings, had prepared the viewers attending the ceremony for the live dance in the Goethe Gallery backyard, where a folk orchestra fiddled some lively tunes to which Hassan and some of his guests responded by reeling-off a folk dance.
Had the drawings prepared the guests for the live celebration, or had the celebration helped them re-construct the drawings through a different optic? Inadvertently drawn by an unknown vital force, the viewers became participants in the musical performance. Whether that force is animated by the lure of the fable represented in drawing or in the dance is immaterial: one remains uncertain about the magic source. When the physical and the mythical merge within the same experiential level, it is futile to determine sources. Perhaps this is life's magic, a magic the narrative drawings help the viewer re-live.
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