| Cairo-based artist Huda Lutfi has been excavating the bedrock of her city for years. In the public repositories of a metropolis layered with its own tangible remnants of memory, Lutfi engaged as both archaeologist and archivist, collecting and exploring with the eye and expertise of a cultural historian—her formal training—long before the artifacts found their rebirth as expressions in works of contemporary art. Today, Lutfi’s scholarly work on Sufism, dream symbolism, medieval and modern Coptic and Islamic festivals, and women and gender dynamics, permeates her work, finding its backbone in collected artifacts, and transmuting into visual metaphors that illuminate an artistry of historical layering as sophisticated in its cultural interpretation as it is in its artistic technique. |  |
Yasmine El Rashidi
Cairo-based artist Huda Lutfi has been excavating the bedrock of her city for years. In the public repositories of a metropolis layered with its own tangible remnants of memory, Lutfi engaged as both archaeologist and archivist, collecting and exploring with the eye and expertise of a cultural historian—her formal training—long before the artifacts found their rebirth as expressions in works of contemporary art. Today, Lutfi’s scholarly work on Sufism, dream symbolism, medieval and modern Coptic and Islamic festivals, and women and gender dynamics, permeates her work, finding its backbone in collected artifacts, and transmuting into visual metaphors that illuminate an artistry of historical layering as sophisticated in its cultural interpretation as it is in its artistic technique.
In her latest work, Zan’it Al-Sittat, Lutfi once again offers a journey of exploration into the infinite and shifting paradigms of a cultural landscape. In this case she explores representations of femininity, borrowing the exhibition title from a marketplace in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria where hordes of women in the throes of daily life find themselves in constrained alleyways that constitute the market. “Zan’it Al-Sittat” literally means the space where women are squeezed together.
In one of the exhibition’s installations, The Perfumed Garden, Lutfi meticulously encloses hand-painted women’s portraits into over 70 vintage perfume bottles gathered from Egyptian flea markets. The conceptual juxtaposition of the work’s title with the visual and metaphorical constraints, offers, once again, the compelling social and political commentary on her cultural context that has distinguished Lutfi’s work from other artistic ruminations that fall short by tending toward merely personal lamentation.
In another installation House Bound, portraits of women from diverse walks of life are collaged in a crowded syntax on the surfaces of two feminine legs, then stuck to a cube-like structure. Lutfi draws on the traditional discourse calling for women to stay in their homes.
“She is perceived, owing to her academic background, as an ‘intruder,’” cultural historians Samia Mehrez and Dina Ramadan, commented in an essay on Lutfi. “An outsider artist who did not receive a formal training in Egypt’s art academies.” Once an intruder, now a celebrated insider, Lutfi carries herself with modest demeanor that illuminates on a work ethic that is more about survival than it is about success. “I started my first collage after a major surgery in 1991,” Lutfi says. “At the time, I wanted to forget the pain, to forget myself. And it was so enjoyable—I would come out of that period of forgetting to find something beautiful….” She has been juggling two professions since that morning 18 years ago, and finally, she says, she is ready to let one go. “After all these years, I am ready to dedicate more time and focus to my visual work…I love the process of creation, the idea, the work itself, the actual manufacture of the idea, and becoming immersed in it. I love the thought of waking up in the morning and continuing a piece, of losing myself to it.”
