Alternative narratives
By
Sonali Pahwa
Jihan Ammar
"I like to blur the lines between documentary photography and traditional genres of portraiture, like the family snapshot. So my pictures of an Iranian family have traces of the journalistic images that exist of such pariah countries. There is a blend of styles and I think this indefinability leads to a greater emphasis on the narrative.
These are photographs of women because I have access to women, not because I'm seeking to explain them. In fact, I resist being boxed into the category of an Egyptian woman and being expected to work accordingly. These pictures of Iranian women have a political dimension for me, since I think they are more insightful than conventional photojournalism.
There is a very active artistic community in Iran and a lot of photography is produced there, which often tends to be photojournalism. My approach is different. I often take a year or two to make a portrait of somebody. I first establish a friendship and then start photographing. Most of the pictures in this exhibit are of my friend Shahrazad. She was very relaxed when I took the pictures and I could just fade into the background. She is a very successful woman who has really pushed her life to its limits, defying the mold of a submissive 17-year-old who married an older man. I have included stories about her in the text accompanying the photographs. It is important for me to complement the images with text, a sort of diary of my musings.
At present, I have two other series of photographs. One is Arousa, which I showed at the biennale in Bamako. The other series, titled Home, consists of pictures of my cousins, the interiors of their homes and their conversations. The nicest thing someone said to me about this exhibit was that they could almost hear the conversations."
Hamdi Attia
"My installation is meant to suggest the inside of a television. I took apart an actual set and strung the wires around the gallery walls. The viewer sees a television screen and can press buttons which appear to offer him a choice, even if it is just the illusion of a choice. But I'm more interested in the space that this installation creates and how it works upon people. In conceiving the effect of the work, I made a particular effort to exclude any hint of poetry.
This exhibit is very different from the more poetic style I used before leaving for the US. I used to combine materials such as silk, clay and iron in order to translate different elements of society into material and traditionally artistic form. But my present work deals more honestly with reality. Contemporary American political rhetoric, for instance, is more magical than the writings of any novelist. Reality has the real magic. So if I were to add conventional poetic elements I would take away from its real poetry.
The usual commonplace about the US is that it is a media society, and that Egypt is a militarised one. But I was quite struck by the military culture of the US and how people there seem to be living in a box, ignorant and fearful of the enemy outside. In Egypt the media seem to parallel this military power. I felt that in addressing media culture, rather than militarism, I would get two birds with one stone. For the catalogue picture I chose a blank screen with the falcon that is the logo of Egyptian satellite television. This, for me, is evocative of watching Egyptian television abroad, with the falcon sometimes obscuring part of the television presenter's face."
Hala El-Koussy
"I would define my reconstructions as working against the documentary image. These are staged scenes and the figures in them are all actors. When I did more conventional documentary photography, I would choose a site, such as Al-Darb Al-Ahmar, go back several times to talk to the people I photographed, and return with pictures for them. But somehow, working in my current technique solves all sorts of questions that I used to have about what I was doing with my subjects. I now concentrate on reconstructing an image to get at an emotion rather than at something that happened. The exhibit title hints that the images are not real, and it questions the perfection of the photograph in recording a moment.
I scout out a location and then cast characters to fit in with it. Then I add details to the scene, drawing upon my background in commercial advertising. Directing actors is easier than photographing other subjects -- I have no qualms about asking them to repeat an action.
The photographs in this exhibit are of locations that mean a lot to me. After returning to Cairo from a spell abroad I have been revisiting my memories of the city. Memory often plays games on you, it heightens your emotions, and then you find things are not as you remembered them. These scenes are consequently very personal -- there is one person in each, whose solitary experience of the place is meant to be echoed by that of the viewer inserted into the scene. For instance, there is a picture of a bus stop that I pass on my way to town every day. This could be just about anywhere but what makes it special for me is that it bears a relic from the 1970s -- a poster advertising Riri baby food, promoted as a local brand, with a picture of a blond baby."
Maha Maamoun
"This project began from a desire to make contemporary urban landscapes or cityscapes of Cairo that convey a texture of the quotidian city through microcosmic fragments or glimpses. For me, floral print fabrics act as a surrogate for nature in the city and offer a point of release in the midst of its hustle and bustle. These moving gardens are more present and prevalent in Cairo than real nature. The pictures are not staged, I simply waited at certain spots for subjects to come along. Aside from being fragments of embedded nature, fabrics worn as clothing also enable me to investigate my relation to people in the city. I used tropes of conventional landscape photography, such as the wide-angle panorama, in my urban landscapes.
My previous work focussed on marginal spaces in Cairo. I participated in a project to document Islamic monuments which it was not possible to restore. Even when these places were not far from the centre of town one felt isolated in them. Now I have moved in to photograph the heart of the city, but I'm still trying to carve out a personal space here. One of my subjects is the Mugamma, which for me is a central part of Cairo's landscape. Not only is it politically central, it is like a natural mountain in the middle of the city. It is a building that fascinates me.
Incidentally, the Mugamma picture in this exhibit alludes to a larger series commissioned for Going Places: A Project for Public Buses, in which I and others create artworks to be placed on the advertising boards of public buses. My work for this series used the Mugamma as the basic component of its architectural landscape."
Amgad Naguib
"I didn't take any of these pictures, I collected them. I bought entire collections of family pictures for next to nothing in the 1980s, before old photographs became fashionable in Cairo. They were far more affordable then than other kinds of artwork. Often these were albums belonging to families of foreign heritage who had lived in Cairo, such as Greeks. When they left the state sold off the belongings they left behind. I even have some love letters that were bundled together with photographs. I sometimes wonder who would dispose of their family history in this way.
You can tell a great deal about a life from personal photographs. Some of the people in the pictures feel as alive and as close to me as if they were my friends. I have witnessed so many moments of their lives. The way people arrange their photographs in albums often suggests a narrative. One woman arranged a selection of photographs of herself chronologically: in couture outfits as a carefree young woman, with her future husband, as a married woman with a young child and a new sadness. After sifting through large numbers of photographs, I know what a certain man's drink of choice was, or what shoes a woman liked best.
I have a unique record of Egypt since the 1860s, of streets, fashions and customs, but above all of Egyptian women. The 1950s and '60s were a remarkable time for women. Before this there was a certain conservatism in dress and manner. But just look at the photographs of women from this era."
Rehab El-Sadek
"I developed this video installation in Kenya, where I was looking for a project that would let me document gender relations in a specific way. I collected the images over there. But when I went to Pakistan I found that the idea was relevant here as well. It has remained important to me to travel in different cultures to develop ideas for art. In these travels I collect information as well as ideas by talking to women and men, particularly poorer people.
I first showed part 'A' of this exhibit in Beirut last year. Although the two figures in it are of ambiguous gender, the general reaction was that it was a piece about the violence of men against women. I realised the need to emphasise that it was about aggression in a wider sense. And so I developed part 'B' for this exhibit, in which I used a video clip of a woman who is angry and forceful.
In addition to a cross-cultural range of reference, the question of time and history plays an important role in my work. I have been particularly interested in ancient Egypt. I did an installation in London in 1998-99 in which I reconstructed an English town and hung it with fragments of text from the myth of Isis and Osiris. My current exhibition has a portion of the text of the eighth century AH legend of Bayad and Riyad. I like to use text as a conceptual element as well as a visual adornment."
For full details of exhibition, see Listings
