Silence is Silver
Silence is Silver
Contemporary Cairo
The history of modern art in Egypt has had a remarkably strong presence of women. Women were prominently active as early as the 1920s. Marianne Brouwer decided to investigate. She travelled to Cairo and spoke with several important members of the younger generation of Egyptian artists and filmmakers.After my earlier visits to Egypt, I am now struck by it: the increase in the number of veiled women is unbelievable. They make up a new middle class, strolling out in the evenings through the shopping districts of Cairo, apparently with but one objective: shop ’til you drop. It seems as though piety has expanded along with materialism. What the real feelings and problems of the population are is demonstrated in the immense success of The Yacoubian Building, a recent filming of a popular novel about an historic building in Cairo and its residents. Day in, day out, long queues wait in front of all the cinemas. Everyone wants to enjoy this satire on the miseries of life, with terrorism, hypocrisy, corruption, dictatorship, violence, homosexuality, forced abortion and poverty. It is all there, even true love. The everyday scene in the streets summarizes the key to salvation from all of these Egyptian plagues in a single symbol: women are wearing veils.
Total Control
‘The new Islam makes women into veiled leaders, in order to use the power of women to exert their control over the whole society. The woman has been turned into a prophetess, a guardian of the new morality. It is no longer about the things that it should be about: education, health care, child labour. It is only about what you should wear.’ Hala Galal (1966), filmmaker and cofounder of SEMAT, an institute for independent cinema in Cairo, is vehement. Her most recent film, Women’s Chitchat (Dardassa Nessae’yat, 2004) is about a hundred years of the history of women in Egypt through the memories and personal discussions among members of four generations of the same family, alternated with historic images of the great pioneers of emancipation in Egypt. It is striking that the two older generations do not wear veils and proudly tell about how difficult it was for them to achieve their independence. The granddaughter and great-granddaughter, in contrast, do wear the veil and see this in turn as a challenging new form for establishing their identity. ‘But despite their reasons for doing it,’ writes historian Albert Hourani, ‘this attitude ultimately tends to reinforce the traditional view of the place of women in society.’1 Since the beginning, the participation of women in both modern art and film in Egypt has been exceptionally extensive.2 Egyptian film has a long history of important women producers and directors, beginning with the first film to be directed by a woman, Aziza Amir’s Laila, made in 1927. The history of film, incidentally, is better documented than the history of modern art, which began with a woman in the 19th century, a certain Princess Samiha, wife of Sultan Hussein, who was reputed to have been a sculptor and even exhibited her work in Paris. Strangely enough, there are no known works by Princess Samiha, nor do we know her life history, although she only died in 1984. Almost the same thing is true for the first modern Egyptian painter, who was also a woman. She was Fatheya Zohni. Only two of her paintings are known, and not a single biographical fact. Of the generation of modern art pioneers, certainly half were women. According to Nazli Madkour (b. 1949), the work of these women cannot be eradicated from the history of modern art in Egypt. Madkour studied political economy, is an artist herself and also compiled the book, Women & Art in Egypt.3 When I looked her up in her studio in Cairo, she explained, ‘In modern art, three factors led to women being able to rise to importance so quickly. First, there was no competition. Women were not pushed out by competition from the men, because modern art in Egypt was something new, and it was not yet clear how much prestige it involved. Moreover, in those years, the women’s emancipation movement was exceptionally active in fighting for equality for women, and it profited from the rise of women in fine art in Europe. Everybody knew Käthe Kollwitz, Sophie Täuber-Arp, Sonia Delaunay and Natalia Goncharova.’
Clichés
A large number of paintings by that first generation of women artists can be seen today at the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art (MEMA), which opened in 1931. To my mind, three names immediately stand out: Margaret Nakhla (1908-1977), Effat Nagui (1905-1994) and Inji Aflaton (1924-1989). Women’s Public Bath, painted in 1947 by Nakhla, a Copt, was a surprise. The title is borrowed from the famous painting by Ingres, but this work is a satirical pastiche, painted as if to say, ‘This is what women really look like – all ages, all colours. This is who we are. Our dyed hair, our sagging breasts and rolls of fat are there to be loved.’ It did not matter which of the clichés about women was destroyed here: the idealized soft-porn odalisque of orientalism, the ideal picture of the modest, veiled woman of Islam, or the nationalistic image of the stylized Egyptian goddess. That modern Egyptian art exists at all, and that it moreover has an important figurative history in an Islamic country is not only thanks to an artistic tradition that goes back to the pharaohs, but is primarily due to an interpretation of what the Koran has to say about the making of images, which was more liberal in Egypt than elsewhere. That was the case for visual art as well as for photography and film. At the beginning of the 20th century, no one less than the Mufti, Egypt’s highest religious authority, spoke positively about it.4 After Egyptian independence and under the Nasser government, women were granted rights to equal pay and general admission to universities. Women gained the right to vote in 1956. ‘That was a major improvement on a lot of levels’, says Hala Galal, ‘but women did not get what was most important. The power to make decisions remained with the men. Despite, for example, the great admiration that Nasser had for the famous Egyptian singer, Umm Kulthum he never let her become his Minister of Culture. Today, women do hold high positions, maybe to show how tolerant the regime is, but I believe that it is all just pretence, because they still do not have a deciding vote. But women also play into the hands of maintaining the status quo – so many of them are afraid of change. Still, women can create problems, in order to facilitate real change.’
Independent initiatives
Social problems, the status of women, fundamentalism and censure are subjects that preoccupy the current generation of artists. Here, for example, we find the beautiful, tormented drawings by Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946), of masses of people in the big city, which Catherine David presented in 2003 at Witte de With in Rotterdam, or the recent photographs reworked with Ecoline, by Sabah Naïem (b. 1967), of people in the street. There is the work of Huda Lutfi (b. 1949), who teaches history of Islamic culture at the American University in Cairo and who began making art in the 1990s, or the installations and videos by Amal Kenawy (b. 1974), full of nightmarish dreams of love and powerlessness. These are just a few of the women of the critical generation that since the mid-1990s has been showing internationally and winning awards for their work, but who still have a hard time in their own country. No one in this generation is represented in the MEMA, which is growing increasingly less representative of what is happening in contemporary art in Egypt. The reason is that all the art-related jobs are filled by artists appointed by the Ministry of Culture. Power in the visual arts and their official institutes is consequently irrevocably tangled up with the personal interests of a limited group of artists, and though one does not speak of an official art of the state, there really is a question of state artists. Independent art schools, or training for curators, for example, or in museum science, do not exist, and there are virtually no independent art critics. The only places where the young generation can show their work, or where young curators can build up some experience, are the handful of independent galleries that Egypt does have, such as L’Espace Karim Francis, Mashrabia Gallery and the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. The Townhouse Gallery in particular is followed with Argus eyes by the Ministry of Culture. Perhaps this is because of the Townhouse’s ambitious intentions and its up-to-date programme of exhibitions and residencies for both Egyptian and international artists, to which the Cairo Biennial, organized with a wealth of resources, looks paltry by comparison. Perhaps too, it is because the upholders of state protectionism and what is in fact a provincial status quo simply do not know what to do with globalism in art. Then there are the artists’ initiatives, including the CIC in Cairo and ACAF, GUDRAN and Alexandria Ateliers in Alexandria. Most of these initiatives were set up and are run by young women. Hala Elkoussy, one of the founders of the CIC, is currently studying at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Social projects in art are new to Egypt. The Townhouse Gallery has a successful emancipation programme for children who work in factories, as well as a programme for refugees, most of whom are from Darfur. In Alexandria, GUDRAN is helping out with the El-MAX project, in which an entire former fishing village, wedged in between the suburbs and with its population out of work, is being set back on its feet.
Censorship
In Egypt, there is in fact a colossal cultural infrastructure in place. Every village has its own cultural palace, but the official institutions do nothing with that infrastructure. Another Egyptian plague is censorship and self-censorship. ‘It is extremely difficult to say where the one ends and the other begins, where the taboos are, where the boundaries lie,’ says Hala Galal. Artist Huda Lutfi was unwittingly caught up in the censorship grindstone. Her work for her 2003 exhibition, Found, at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo included an installation with old wooden shoemakers’ moulds, which she cleaned and painted a silver colour. Then she wrote a Sufi poem on them, a meditative text, which when repeated often enough, leads to a state of inner peace. A second installation of silver shoe moulds, without texts, was meant to represent that silence. The moulds with the text were used in the illustration for the poster for the exhibition. Someone in the neighbourhood made an anonymous complaint about the combination of shoes and a religious text, and Lufti was called in to defend her work to the police. The posters and the invitations were confiscated and removed from the walls. The exhibition did take place, but the offending installation was only shown on request, in the presence of the artist. A few months later, a cultural centre in Bahrain requested this work, among others, to show in a Huda Lufti retrospective exhibition. All works of art sent out of Egypt have to be inspected in advance by the art affairs department of the Egyptian airport police. When the work was inspected, the person who transported the work was arrested on suspicion of blasphemy. Personnel working for the (Coptic) transport company were questioned and an investigation into the Townhouse Gallery was begun. Huda Lutfi was officially accused of the following offences: exploitation of the Islamic faith, conspiracy with the Coptic community to undermine the Islamic faith and posing a threat to the Egyptian nation. This was based on the statement by a specially selected religious expert, who judged that the text she had used should be viewed as a hadith (a tradition handed down from Mohammed) and that combining it with shoes should be seen as a serious religious offence. It took Lutfi three hours to explain to a CIA-trained inspector at the Ministry of State that the moulds were not ‘shoes’, but stood for the human figure in a position of meditation, after which the accusations against her were not subsequently pursued. The work itself has still not been released. In a later installation, Lutfi gave the entire affair an ironic commentary by once again exhibiting silver shoe moulds, this time without texts. The installation is called Silence is Silver.5
Marianne Brouwer
