| Cairo is the last living medieval city in the world. It bursts with 20 million people along a narrow fertile strip along the Nile, 20 million people who somehow manage to live inside an organized chaos. Archaeologists affirm that there are more standing 10th- to 17th-century buildings in this city than anywhere else in the world. Most of these buildings are lived in, worked in, or worshipped in. While most tourists make the predictable trips to the pyramids and the Luxor temples, and cruise the Nile, living Cairo is much more than its historic past loaded with its uniqueness. Catherine David has noted that unlike the rest of Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan), Egypt has a heightened awareness of its own continuity, with a deep-rooted tradition, geographically, socially, and historically. |  |
Horace Brockington
Cairo is the last living medieval city in the world. It bursts with 20 million people along a narrow fertile strip along the Nile, 20 million people who somehow manage to live inside an organized chaos. Archaeologists affirm that there are more standing 10th- to 17th-century buildings in this city than anywhere else in the world. Most of these buildings are lived in, worked in, or worshipped in. While most tourists make the predictable trips to the pyramids and the Luxor temples, and cruise the Nile, living Cairo is much more than its historic past loaded with its uniqueness. Catherine David has noted that unlike the rest of Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan), Egypt has a heightened awareness of its own continuity, with a deep-rooted tradition, geographically, socially, and historically. But literary and artistic experience can be conceived of as a struggle to achieve both individual freedom and political liberation.
Cairo’s contemporary art scene emerged in 1995, and has since then been offering expounded new forms of visual communication in a rather traditional society. In modern day Cairo, a combination of the very old and the very new, finds its restatement in the art of a new generation of young artists, encouraged and supported by private initiatives. The challenge is now to articulate and consolidate a critical culture able to deal with the many complexities of the contemporary Egyptian context, and to oppose the simplifying procedures of standardization and codification at work in the dominant visual culture produced by globalization, and indirectly, by the “agendas” of a few large cultural organizations.
Due to concentrated attention on the Middle East over the last few years, there has been a dramatic increase in international exhibition by Egyptian artists. Such participation has predominantly come in the form of platforms with a particular geographical or cultural focus. Cairo’s scene is one that has grown considerably in importance in the last ten years in both the amount and quality of production. Cairo has come to assume a position at the center of art production in the Middle East and a place where international curators come regularly looking for new discoveries.
Some of these exhibitions focusing on Middle Eastern and North African artists don’t challenge or overcome the boundaries that have been constructed between the East and the West. Instead, they reinforce these boundaries, perpetuating many of the preconceived ideas in circulation as well as creating new clichés about what it is to be Arab, African, or Muslim, with exhibition titles such as disorientation, contemporary art representation, contemporary African art, breaking the veil, Africa remix, and Orient-Okzident. By focusing on the group rather than the individual, the curator simplifies an entire region, a continent, or a religious group neatly into one unified entity. So too comes the assumption that there is only one version of being an Arab artist across the Middle East. As one Middle Eastern artist has noted that this renders the others as anonymous faces amongst millions, and that while the Western artist is considered as an individual, his/her art approached because of its exceptionality, his/her non-Western counterpart is selected to represent a collective.
Ironically, not only does the contemporary art scene in Cairo stand at the periphery of the international art scene, it also often stands at the periphery of the “official” art scene of Egypt. The geographical periphery for many artists living in the region becomes a platform where an investigation of marginalization issues takes place, including those related to economical, social, moral, political, religious, physical, or sexual. Video works, paintings, multimedia installations, and photography focus on complex themes and personal accounts. Many of the artists construct an art that plays off a narrative of life on the “margin.” Often the content of the works encourages the viewer to reach beyond the immediate to feelings of intense alienation, solitude, suspension, politics, and poetry. Many of the works confront life on the fringe, both personally and artistically, while questioning the construction of memory, and the dynamic between individual history and collective remembrance.
Now many young artists active in Cairo create art that, while addressing concerns pertinent to their particular locality, transcends national and ethnic boundaries. Some artists recently have gone from the personal to the global, and created work that rises above the understanding of “peripheral” art as a reduced product of politics, economics, and geography. Many of their works have a significant relationship to constructs of conflict and war, given Egyptian history and its current geographic and political position in the Middle East.
After decades of decline, the late 19th century witnessed Egypt’s turn toward the West. The modern Egyptian pictorial art is a phenomenon of the 20th century that resulted from the intensive encounter with European culture. Historically art in Egypt was influenced mainly by tradition and the conventional mode of life. In the early 20th century it became a fusion of the historic and national themes, and the idea of building a modern nation.
The Ministry of Culture became, and remains the main player in the artistic arena in Cairo. It holds several spaces for exhibitions. In the past, the official representative of Egypt in the Venice Biennial was the head of the fine arts sector in the Ministry of Culture. The ministry dispenses with a budget for artists’ stipendiums. It holds a national yearly grand exhibition showcasing the work of artists under the age of 35 with prizes given in different categories. It also runs a museum of modern art, which has a yearly acquisitions budget. As the art promoted by the ministry is out of touch, and the museum’s acquisitions budget is not necessarily well spent, numerous artists shy away from that scene, choosing instead to find a place for their work elsewhere.
The Cairo Biennial, which started in 1984, and opened up to participants outside the Arab world from 1986 onwards, is modeled on the Venice Biennial: there are national pavilions, organized by the different national representatives, honorary guests selected by the higher committee, and special invitations also selected by the higher committee. All the artists and curators have to abide by the manifesto of Commissaire Général. Every work must be submitted to the organizers’ judgment, and may be removed at any time should it not reflect the prestige of the biennial or hurt religious sensitivity. The organizers of the Cairo Biennial are often some of the people who direct and sometimes participate in the exhibitions of the Egyptian pavilion at the Venice and Sao Paulo Biennials.
In the last ten years, however, we have started to see art by young producers that is not burdened by heritage or political propaganda, art that looks like it is in and of its time. Many of the emerging contemporary artists originate from Alexandria, and are the pioneering graduates of the Alexandria Atelier. In the early 90s these young graduates began experimenting with contemporary mediums such as video, performance, and installation. As opposed to their modernist predecessors, their work was conceptually grounded, and posed questions on the social, economic, and political environment. These were the pioneers of today’s contemporary Egyptian art scene, including Wael Shawky, Rehab Elsadek, Amina Mansour, and Mona Marzouk. Their works received a very positive response, and gained much acclaim at the new government-sponsored “Youth Salon,” an annual event that was established in 1989 to provide artists under the age of 35 the opportunity to present their work. It is important to note that the only available venues for the presentation of visual arts at the time were public institutions, whose selection processes were, and remain either ad hoc or nepotistic.
After the initial success, these new artists had nowhere else to present their work as the government’s infrastructure impeded presentation in other local venues. The work itself was stagnant due to a lack of exposure, exchange opportunities, and theoretical debate, few resources for production, and most importantly, a lack of critical analysis. With the internationalization of exhibition projects and new Web-based technological developments, however, the local contemporary visual language gradually became globalized.
Later in 1996, a number of Cairo-based commercial galleries, including Mashrabia Gallery, Espace Karim Francis, Cairo-Berlin Gallery, and the Townhouse Gallery, opened with a specific interest in presenting contemporary art. Contemporary artists began to attract the attention of local media and a wider audience. This new momentum reached its peak in 1999, when the galleries co-organized Al-Nitaq Festival, Egypt’s first and only independent visual arts showcase. Held in both 2000 and 2001, the Nitaq Festival served as perhaps the most immediate sign that the Egyptian art scene is active. An initiative of three independent galleries, Karim Francis, Mashrabia, and Townhouse, the downtown arts festival generated an unprecedented degree of excitement in the city for contemporary artists. The preferred avenue of expression for the artists at Nitaq was multimedia installation executed with conceptualist tendencies. Nitaq proved most unconventional, shaking up stagnant conceptions surrounding the use of space, medium, and the potential for dematerialization of the art object. Although the festival did not manage to sustain itself as an annual event, it clearly marked the split between the art of the public and private institutions. Unfortunately, these commercial galleries were destined to fall into the same trap as the government institutions by grappling on to the cultural project forum often as the only way of acquiring funds while lacking both the initiative and know-how to infiltrate the market. Today, the institutions have not developed to accommodate the increasing number of promising artists, or to actively participate in the international art scene.
The art scene being reliant on outside forces in the form of foreign financing creates a very unstable situation that is full of speculation. Cultural policies of countries change, and interest shifts across the globe. While Egypt will remain important by virtue of its size and its position at the heart of the Middle East, it is still vulnerable to the economic slump in the West that reflects itself in terms of budget cuts for cultural institutions, and as a decrease in available resources for local artists.
Artists now start finding new means for production and presentation, dismissing the significance of qualitative judgment in cultural production and policy. Slowly they are gaining international support, including Foreign Cultural Institutions, Ford Foundation, the Dutch Fund for Culture, Pro-Helvetia, and Goethe Institut. In Cairo only a handful of private galleries defy the decorative and commercial, and Townhouse Gallery is one of them. The Townhouse Gallery was founded in 1998 on the first floor of a dilapidated building from the turn of the century on the edge of the downtown area, which still bears the traces of its past as the Paris of the Orient in the heart of Cairo’s mechanics’ district. It has become one of the most exciting and novel sites for contemporary arts. Townhouse itself has evolved since its inception. Never a traditional gallery space, Townhouse has largely grown in relation to the needs of the community around it. Townhouse serves as a platform for those artists who would otherwise not have access to one, theater groups who are in need of rehearsal space, filmmakers and video makers, whose entries make it into the monthly film programs.
