A homage to Mokhtar
Nehad Selaiha watches as statues briefly come to life in Walid Aouni's Mahmoud Mokhtar and the Khamaseen Winds
The idea of arresting the flow of time, of conquering the painful ephemerality at the heart of life, of defeating mortality or netting a few precious moments from the stream of days to fix them eternally, for all time, lies at the heart of many works of representational art. But more than painting or photography, three-dimensional sculptured figures or expressive forms seem to contain within them a latent dynamicity, a potential for mutation, the power to come to life. When the Pharaohs asked their sculptors to preserve their likeness in imperishable granite they believed the statue would work its spell when they were dead and help the soul to keep alive in and through the image. One of their words for sculptor was "he-who-keeps-alive". The same meaning has continued to inform our experience of great sculptural works in later times. Standing before Michelangelo's Dying Slave in the Louvre in Paris, Gombrich found it "difficult to think of this work as being a statue of cold and lifeless stone ... It seems to move before our eyes and yet to remain at rest."
Paradoxically, the sense of awe this illusion generates is always accompanied, in my experience at least, with a pitiful awareness that the other side of this power is mortality -- that, were the arrested life to break free of its stone or bronze confines it would inevitably sink back into the fluid temporal state we call life and dissolve into its transient flux. Lifelike figures in paintings or photographs seem less threatened; they are part of a scene, of a spatio- temporal constructed world -- a virtual reality which, however illusory, exists on a different plane of experience where motion is not synonymous with finiteness and the paradox of mobility in eternity is admissible. Lifelike statues are not similarly framed; whether they are placed in a public square or a museum, or dumped in a storeroom or a backyard, the background against which they stand, the context in which we view and experience them is our world, our reality. Their stillness, which sets them apart, seems a forced, temporary freezing, like the stillness of Sleeping Beauty or the Biblical Seven Sleepers. Looking at Mahmoud Mokhtar's peasant women drawing water from the river, standing on its shore, crouching in sorrow, sitting with a knee drawn up against the chest, a bent arm resting on it to support a sleeping head, or forging ahead, like ships with swelling and billowing sails, against the Khamaseen storms, you experience an overpowering feeling that at any moment, they will come alive and speak to you or simply straighten up and walk away.
This powerful suggestion of latent life, of motion momentarily arrested, brings representational sculpture, as well as the more recent spatial and kinetic varieties of that art, very close to theatre as a contingent, multi-disciplinary representational art, constructed out of the movement of human and inanimate forms and sounds in space and time. Walid Aouni draws on this connection and foregrounds it in his latest work, Mahmoud Mokhtar and the Khamaseen Winds. Unlike his earlier choreographic/ scenographic tribute to painter Taheya Halim, which featured both her life and work, the present piece concentrates solely on the living art of the dead master, drawing on it for both artistic form and content. Mokhtar's historical contribution to Egyptian culture was the recovery and reinstatement of the forgotten art of sculpture which the rise of anti- representational creeds had suspected and discredited as a leftover from paganism. His human figures, in stone, plaster, bronze, or marble hark back quite vividly to Ancient Egyptian sculpture, linking the present with the past -- Isis and the Bride of the Nile with Umm Kulthum and Saad Zaghloul -- across a gap of centuries; whatever posture they assume and whatever the emotion the shapes of the bodies express, their outlines always remain firm, simple and restful, reflecting that combination of geometrical regularity and keen observation of nature characteristic of all Ancient Egyptian art.
Mokhtar's contribution to the evolution of the idea of "Egyptianness" as a national identity through his restoration of Egypt's pre- Christian, pre-Islamic past in his works inspired the conceptual framework, simple narrative line and characters in Mahmoud Mokhtar and the Khamaseen Winds. Drawing on the image of the Pharaoh as a deity and on the ancient African worship of ancestors, it focusses on the idea of creation and tells a simple story. A Pharaoh-god, in the shape of a dark, sinewy figure with a jackal-like gait (Mustapha Haroun), descends from the top of a mountain at the back, holding the symbols of his creativity -- a sculptor's chisel and mallet -- and wades through what looks like a swirling amorphous mass of matter (created by the dancers' bodies). Gradually he shapes this chaos into human figures and breathes life into them, then singles out one (Hani Mahmoud), dresses him as Mokhtar used to dress and, in a symbolic gesture, hands over to him his sculptor's tools, thus endowing him with the creative power to immortalise himself and others through his art.
From that moment on the performance unfolds as a series of manifestations of this divine gift in sculptural feats in which the dancers first represent the real-life figures who inspired Mokhtar, then the sculptures which immortalised them. With the help of Aouni's costumes and lighting, the empty stage, bounded at the back by dark, rugged mountains and flanked on either side by electric fans on high stands and dangling lamps with straw shades, strongly evoked the feel and atmosphere of an old village at the edge of the desert in Upper Egypt. In this figurative setting Mokhtar meets, simultaneously or in succession, singly or in groups, the originals of many of his statues -- graceful peasant women carrying their water jugs to the Nile, going to the market with goods to sell, or returning from it, veiled Cairene women, wives of village dignitaries or aldermen, farmers and Cairene men of the lower classes, as well as Saad Zaghloul, Umm Kulthum and Hoda Sha'rawi. With the help of white stretch sacks and voluminous white sheets which flutter and billow in the wind created by the fans, and against a stirring soundtrack which combines African and Western music and old Egyptian songs, the dancers, guided by Mokhtar's hand and his chisel, with the Pharaoh looking on and occasionally assisting, transform themselves into many of his most famous works: Fallaha, La Fiancée du Nil, Retour du Marche, Saad Zaghloul, Renaissance d'Egypte, Idylle, Au Bord du Nil, A la Vue de l'Homme, Le Gardien des Champs, Retour du Fleuve, Vers l'Aimé, Tireuse d'Eau, Isis, and Vendeuse de Fromage and, of course, Al-Khamaseen, which winds up this wonderful kinetic display.
The choice of The Khamaseen Winds to figure in the title of this homage to Mokhtar was an ironic and telling reference to our own time. Part of the show's impact stemmed from the timing of its performance, in the maelstrom of turbulent events and violent upheavals that are shaking the very foundations of this part of the world. With a painful irony the Khamaseen winds of backwardness and bigotry which Mokhtar -- like the figure in his Khamaseen statue -- fought against in the hope of ushering in a new Egyptian Renaissance of art, science, enlightenment and tolerance, and thought he had conquered, are still with us, more stifling than ever.
