| Born in 1977 in Assiut, Basim Magdi lives and works in Cairo. He received his BFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University in 2000. At a time when the relevance of painting is continuously questioned, and as new mediums advance, Basim Magdi has found the means to fuse to modernism and the new by working with imagery of conflict derived from the mass media, such as TV, films, computer games, and propaganda. He then translates them, and finally reinterprets them via the media of painting and drawing. Magdi’s generation never experienced war directly. Instead, they grew up amidst naïve surrogates: violent toys. Guns, knives, robots, tanks, soldiers, and computer games abound in Magdi’s art, which is based on a media-driven language. |  |
Horace Brockington
Basim Magdi
Born in 1977 in Assiut, Basim Magdi lives and works in Cairo. He received his BFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University in 2000. At a time when the relevance of painting is continuously questioned, and as new mediums advance, Basim Magdi has found the means to fuse to modernism and the new by working with imagery of conflict derived from the mass media, such as TV, films, computer games, and propaganda. He then translates them, and finally reinterprets them via the media of painting and drawing.Magdi’s generation never experienced war directly. Instead, they grew up amidst naïve surrogates: violent toys. Guns, knives, robots, tanks, soldiers, and computer games abound in Magdi’s art, which is based on a media-driven language. He translates the imagery into contrived, attractive paintings, using a hyper-real aesthetic replete with bright, synthetic colors, and simplistic motifs. He uses paint to question and redefine official versions of heroism, patriotism, and collective memory.
In Dream On, a collaborative effort with Swiss artist Marianne Rinderknecht, Magdi fashions a fantasy landscape against the backdrop of a surreal ice cream world of pastel swirls and stars. Amidst the idyllic ice cream, creatures that are reminiscent of characters in animated computer games invade the murals. What at first sight appears to be a safe dream-like playground of the mind is rendered complex and troubling at second glance; ice cream and war scenes fuse to create a world in which opposites co-exist in a perverse manner parallel to that of human existence.
Amina Mansour
Amina Mansour is of Egyptian American background with no formal training in art. Mansour’s early work was rooted in the construction of delicate cotton sculptures, evocative of femininity, and tying together both of the cotton-growing cultures that she knows. Her point of departure becomes her unlikely upbringing between the American South and the Egyptian city of Alexandria.Placed in clean, sterile vitrines, her sculptures create a space in which the patriarchal nature of both cultures comes across in most subtle fashion. Mansour capitalizes on the fact that aristocratic cotton trading families in both cultures shared some similar tastes and sensibilities. The darkly veneered vitrine represents the kind of objets d’arts one would find in the homes of such families. The artist’s juxtaposition of the two cultures is evident in the oval-shaped, hand-painted porcelain plaque embedded in the middle of the vitrine. An illustration depicting an American antebellum home at center are plaques with the names of prosperous, cotton-trading Egyptian families inscribed on the plaques slightly protruding surface. Family names such as Salvago, Moustaki, and Khoury suggest that these families were of Italian, Greek, Levantine as well as Egyptian origin.
The artist’s eccentricity is palpable in a surrealistic approach where she replaces the slender tubular legs typical of such furniture with muscular female legs carved out of wood. These feminine yet masculine legs which rest on elegant but claw-like hands can be read as metaphors for the relationship between the working class and the privileged traders. The cotton floral bouquet, the centerpiece of the vitrine, suggests that the seedling forms of Mansour’s earlier pieces have evolved into multi-cellular organisms.
In her latest work, the construction of a table is the focal point. A tranquil seascape sits atop the table, as if a centerpiece, a body that links disparate geographies. Here, the floral entities of the artist’s past projects have developed into quasi-human organisms formulated from images of female hands. Computer-generated hand symbols signify a peculiar sign language that seems to be communicating the organisms’ newly found will. The symbols imply a need for movement after a long span of directionless existence.
Tarek Zaki
Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1975, Tarek Zaki received his BA in graphics from the
Faculty of Fine Arts in 1998. Zaki has exhibited his work locally and internationally. Zaki’s artistic discourse focuses on recreating mundane recognizable objects. With a subtle artistry and developed sense of the sublime, Zaki alters the “presence” of the objects he mimics, combining the subjectivity of hand with objectivity of concept and subject matter.In his most recent installation work, Zaki created a museum environment for handmade “archaeological artifacts” by placing them in conventional vitrines and imitating traditional museum settings. In his installation, Zaki represents a déjà vu view of modern/contemporary times, using a molding technique in creating casts of mundane post-modern objects, such as electric circuits, computer keyboards, digital accessories, and computerized rocket-like bombs, adding subtle trompe l’oeil effects that mimic the weathered and decomposed nature of fossils and archaeological specimens.
The artifacts Zaki (re)creates have no ethnic connotation. These antiquities belong to a period where the individualistic spirit is sacrificed in favor of a generalized system, globalism, and totalitarianism. Displayed in glass cabinets, the fossilized, tablets, rockets, and gadgets are cut off from the world of “current events,” while still managing to symbolically relate to it.
Doa Aly
Doa Aly has interned in art and design studios in both New York and Milan. Further work as an art director in an advertising company in Cairo has led to her growing interest in the politics of the body. Her repertoire of references puts the body in direct questioning of its image, and physical ability.In her paintings, sculpture, video, and performative videos, she explores the human body’s physicality and the codes through which it accesses public space. Her paintings use reduced representations of the body and its anatomy to symbolize its vacillation between a current and potential existence. In her performative videos, she explores ideas relating to the body as a stage, a site for growth, and identity, subjecting her own body to unfulfilled exhaustion. Aly’s proposes attempts at transcendence without ever transcending its physical limitations.
Hala Elkoussy
Hala Elkoussy has stated that the point of departure of her work is how identity is constructed, transformed, and expressed through the making, coding, and consumption of an image. Within the parameters of a visual culture, which is trying to come to terms with an inherited discouragement of figurative representation, there is a continuous appropriation, assimilation, recycling, and adaptation of popular Western and mass media imagery. Existing within a cultural system where the photographic, except in the context of family photography and advertising, is viewed with skepticism, even feared, her practice attempts to coin a personal/public language.Elkoussy appropriates mainstream modes of visual expression, such as advertising, and proceeds to push the boundaries of the “photographable” and the “photogenic” in order to break down and question socially transfixed roles, and the process of social integration/marginalization of difference. Elkoussy’s work is largely framed in the “art world” according to her place of origin and background as a Middle-Eastern woman. Her approach is an attempt aimed at broadening the viewer’s experience of the art object from the “periphery” as more than just a product of geography and politics, but as a fluid space for the interplay of personal, societal, conceptual, and aesthetic concerns.
