Postcard from Cairo: “Cairo Documenta 2”

The debut of Cairo Documenta in December 2010 garnered much attention from the city’s intimate art scene, with the show’s rough exhibition space in an abandoned hotel; the DIY aesthetic of the hanging; the youth of the participants; the strategic off-Biennale timing of the event; and the generally defiant attitude of the organizers towards Egyptian art institutions and galleries.

This year, for Cairo Documenta 2, the locale, the relative youth of most participants and the core group of artists remained the same. A couple artists even chose to exhibit works very similar to those they presented last year, even in the same spaces, while substituting previous concerns for ‘revolution’-themed subject matter, which struck a somewhat false note. The exhibition’s organizers – artists Ahmed Talal, Mohamed Abdelkarim, Mohamed Allam, Ahmed El Shaer, Ahmed Nagy and Mahmoud Hamdi – also reminded us that the exhibition was, again, not ‘curated’: the artists themselves selected the preferred site for their contributions, making for some strange pairings. Surprisingly perhaps, this approach tended to reinforce the exhibition’s character as a group show rather than emphasizing individual contributions. Moreover, due to the diversity of the works themselves, the visitor moved from room to room with a certain anticipation, unable to develop the outlines of a preconceived underlying logic or determine a single set of aesthetic or conceptual priorities. The earlier tone of defiance against a vaguely sketched art world, which was manifest in the first Cairo Documenta, seemed muted here in a way that appeared to speak to a newfound confidence among the artists. The organizers invested a certain amount of effort in mediating the picturesquely deteriorating walls and ripped-out plumbing of the hotel: one wing of the exhibition, which spanned the first floor of the hotel, was painted white, but this may have been left over from another, earlier exhibition in the same space. Furthermore, greater care seemed to have been taken in the production of many of the works, though a notable exception was the continued disregard for the Arabic-to-English translations included in many of the works or their accompanying wall captions.

Perhaps the only place this disregard seemed appropriate was in Gehad Anwar’s If you have an animal…let me know (2012), which included what appeared to be a printed transcript of an online conversation between the artist (or rather the artist’s stand-in, Aamina), and a group of online admirers, which read, ‘I am an artist. I was born to creativity’. Next to the transcript was a digital print of a painting of a woman with a panda bear, which visitors were encouraged to understand as a work produced by Aamina Adam, the rather crassly commercial and clichéd fictional artist, who ends the online conversation with the following note: ‘Hi, Thank you, I like animals … the price for commission an animal portrait is $3000, just send me a photo of your animal, if you want to add something fantastique to your animal, the price is negotiable…’ This particular work seemed to treat the informal, often imprecise written language of chat rooms as one element in a damning portrait of an artist-archetype that is perhaps especially familiar to the Egyptian art scene. Elsewhere, however, the sloppy English-language rendering of Arabic text tended to compromise those works in which it appeared, suggesting that a complete absence of translation might have been better than a half-hearted attempt in the flavour of Google Translate. Cairo Documenta was far from the only exhibition in Egypt with this issue. It seems trivial to insist on professional-looking wall texts, but when English text appears as a significant component of the work, the issue seems worth reconsidering. On the one hand, the absence of strong English translation risks compromising the work. Artists might be understood to propose, perhaps despite themselves, a position vis-à-vis translation and the dominance of English language across the so-called international art world – a position, which, while entirely valid and indeed welcome, is most powerful when, espoused deliberately and with some self-reflexivity. On the other hand, it points to systemic issues related to a lack of funding and/or access to qualified translators, which may not afflict every artist in this context but would certainly effect some, with Cairo Documenta remaining deliberately independent of external financial support. Ultimately, it seems impossible to condemn, but it is difficult to avoid the issue. Still, if 2010’s Cairo Documenta was something of an exhibition-as-art-squat or vice-versa, this year’s Cairo Documenta 2 claimed a more elevated, less scruffy role for itself, and in my opinion, a greater number of works that rewarded careful engagement.

The organizers’ positioning of the exhibition as outside the art institution per se, while remaining squarely within a traditional exhibition format, made Cairo Documenta a lightening rod for both praise and critique. Predictably, the event has been approached primarily for what it says about the nature of art being produced by young artists in Egypt, in a context where artistic production is often conceived in relation to a schematic of ‘the generation’. Yet this overlooks the ways in which many of the works were already in dialogue with established artists, participating in divergent approaches to art-making, and ultimately, the extent to which the exhibition spoke to existing conditions and broader changes underway in Egypt’s art worlds.

While the exhibition coincided with the revolution’s one-year anniversary, many artists in Cairo Documenta 2 approached the topic of Egypt’s famous ‘18 days’ warily, avoiding the style of revolution-kitsch painting that has already established itself as an autonomous genre in Cairo’s commercial art galleries. Also absent was any reference to Cairo’s now ubiquitous graffiti, whose status as Egypt’s ‘revolution art’ has been spun for some time already in the foreign as well as local media. At the same time, in an apparent acknowledgment of the power of the mediated image that has shaped events over the past year, many of the works presented drew on what might be described as a generically Pop art aesthetic. In some of these works, the revolution – a word that by now seems emptied of any productive use in this text, as in general usage – was front and centre. In others, it remained just out of sight or merely a side-note to other, more pressing issues, which continue to be central to ongoing political and social events, as well as to the place of the reproducible image in relation to the broader context. In a fair number of works, the ‘revolution’ seemed irrelevant. Ahmed Badry’s oversized painted sculpture of an emergency glass-breaker (Life Hammer, 2012), hung on the wall, offered a subtle nod to the pervasive mood of increased constraint and anxiety marking the so-called post-revolutionary moment: the sense that new lines achieved through both legitimate and illegitimate means are being drawn evermore tightly around those who envisaged different outcomes for the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

However, it is the medium of painting that appeared to have laid a claim most assertively to the topic of ‘revolution’. Three of the five artists with painting submissions addressed Egypt’s revolution by way of an engagement with its associated symbols. These three artists also share an affinity for depicting isolated objects against monochromatic backgrounds and for bright, primary or off-primary colours. Ahmed Shawky presented a triptych depicting a spray bottle, blender and lighter, respectively, set against monochromatic backgrounds interrupted only by a horizontal stripe (Accusative Case, 2012). The choice of objects, while not the most obvious, evokes the role these items have played in the street battles with police and military police forces, and a post-revolution framework of violence and sabotage: the spray bottle containing vinegar combats the effects of tear gas; the lighter may have been used to light Molotov cocktails and/or the historical Institut d’Égypte and caches of incriminating documents; the blender’s references are more opaque, a metaphor perhaps for a state of affairs in disarray or a reference to the often awkwardly inappropriate symbols used to identify parties and candidates in Egypt’s recent parliamentary elections. The same phrase positioned next to each object on the canvas plays on Arabic grammatical terminology to refer to instruments of oppression. Nearby, Ahmed Talal presented five paintings of satellite dishes and television receivers, which, while not entirely ‘revolution’-specific, were easily interpreted in this context in relation to the all-important role of the televised image in recent events (Antennas, 2012). Finally, Hany Rashed displayed a series of twelve paintings curiously entitled ‘Jamestown 2012’ (2012). Some of these depicted traffic signs bearing the names of locales central both to the first 18 days of the uprising, as well as to the subsequent clashes at Mohamed Mahmoud, Sheikh al-Rihan and Kasr al-Aini streets. Others portrayed nearby statues of important historical figures, which dot Cairo’s downtown and have been gradually transformed both into symbols of the events transpiring beneath them and into public bulletin boards upon which political slogans and personal messages are scrawled or pasted.

From almost the first moment, the issue of artists’ responses to the revolution and to the ongoing political and social struggles taking place in its wake was debated in public and amongst friends. What has become increasingly clear is that the evermore complex situation, in which the ruling military council’s long-term designs on power and its resistance to the most basic demands of the January/February 2011 protests, invites a conceptually sophisticated approach that can escape the facile one-liner of the political cartoon and the naively celebratory work, which cuts the narrative short at the ‘happy ending’ of Mubarak’s resignation. Yet thus far, works ‘about’ the revolution tend to rely on its associated slogans and icons. Too often these works disappoint, perhaps because the revolution’s breathtaking success as a spectacle – one that continues to unfold before our eyes – overshadows the attempts to rework its imagery within the framework of an artistic practice. As a result, many of these efforts seem to reduce the complexity of the issues at hand and fall short of the critical power and visual shock of the original events.

One group of works in the exhibition drew on Egypt’s incredibly rich universes of visual culture for subject matter but also, it seemed, channelling a popular imagination situated in the image-saturated post-revolutionary moment. The use of pastiche, collage and the repetition of images read as a psychedelically stylized hysteria that teetered on a Facebook-inspired kaleidoscope of images and video trolled from the Internet. References to television shows, advertising, political propaganda, religious leaders, body culture and sex were rendered in highlighter bright colours. Marwa Elshazly and Hatem Helmy placed printed images side-by-side to create expanding vortices, while Ahmed Sabry continued to build on a technique presented at the last Cairo Documenta, creating a series of ironically kitsch paintings incorporating, in one example, the bust of a sheikh and two symmetrically positioned white rabbits (Masterstroke, 2011). These works should not be conflated, and Helmy’s wall collage, while seemingly incomplete, drew one in with a wit and vivacity that went beyond the ironic pose struck by the work of all three artists.

Finally, there seemed to be an argument for another set of loosely related works, associated – if perhaps only in my own mind – by their ability to speak to a sense of pervasive uncertainty and instability, and to conjure a convincing glimpse of the ephemeral as a medium and form. Perhaps this approach appeared to succeed due to the venue of the abandoned Viennoise Hotel, which has appeared to teeter for years on the brink of collapse. Or maybe it was because the anxiety and intoxicating potential of hopes and superstructures poised dramatically on the brink of disappearance spoke most convincingly to the exhibition’s immediate context. One such work was Mohamed Abdelkarim’s charismatic wall-sized print of a crane seen from below against the backdrop of the delicate pinkish-purple tail end of a sunset (Untitled, 2011). Overlaying the image in large, white font is an Arabic phrase that reads: ‘And they said, this must be what faith is’ [my translation]. The work evoked the Romantic tradition of conjuring the sublime in the painted landscape alongside the dystopia of the alienating machine-made landscape. The latter was communicated recently via images of Dubai and Abu Dhabi’s madly multiplying construction projects, and locally in relation to the apparently unrelenting expansion of Greater Cairo in new apartment blocks and villas with names that promise a pastoral idyll for those with sufficient means to escape the chaotic inner city. Faith, it seems, would be built on our powerlessness against these twin forces of nature and human greed – the latter the lynchpin in the much-touted ‘stability’ of the former regime.

Jasmina Metwally’s installation of two paintings and one projected video occupied its own room and wed her work as an activist to the artist’s studio (About a donkey that wanted to become a painting, 2011). The subject of the video is a dead, bloated donkey lying on its side. Below the image, a text tells the famous story in which Friedrich Nietzsche, suffering a mental breakdown, intervened to stop a man who was viciously beating his horse. Metwally shot the footage during a trip to an area of the countryside devastated by the annexation of Egypt’s limited water resources by large agricultural corporations, which has led to the death of livestock and the implosion of entire villages. On the walls nearby hang two paintings, which appeared at first as sickly bright yellow monochromes. One, in fact, carries a faint rendering of the dead donkey’s hind legs, while the other bears a patina of dust and a trail of paw prints left by a passing cat. The combined works formed a fragile whole that slowly opened itself up to the inquisitive visitor. Ultimately, the juxtaposition of the decomposing animal – a testimonial to political and economic violence – and the layering of dust on canvas, which appeared both to ‘build’ the monochromes while promising their eventual deterioration, offered a compelling sense of inertia, an articulate portrait of the ultimate coincidence of the processes of deterioration and accretion. This interest in time and process was notably absent in many of the other works in the show, even if the exhibition as a whole seemed to encourage us to reflect on the works as part of an impermanent and ad hoc whole, housed within a crumbling infrastructure and situated at the volatile heart of the city. In a room next-door, Mahmoud Hallwy’s diptych Defense fund: Multi-media project. Part I, Holy Land (2011) presented the viewer with a framed English/Arabic text describing fictitious research by one ‘Oliver Candy’ on the subject of a mysterious tribe in Siberia inhabiting a sacred area forbidden to the outside world. Next to this was a technical drawing produced using computer software of the underground fortifications of a perimeter wall. The wall’s irregular dimensions were based on those that regularly appear in Cairo’s urban satellite cities, designed to operate as self-sustaining worlds, keeping the outer world at bay. It was this minimalist drawing, almost invisible from a distance yet meticulous in its attempt to devise an impenetrable physical barrier, that seduced the viewer, rather than the now-familiar ruse of fictitious research. In a very different register, Mahmoud Hamdi created an installation of some hundreds of drinking glasses half filled with water and a nearby amplifier blaring out an insistent bass beat (Everything is effective although circumstances are different, 2012) . It wasn’t clear to me that the work succeeded on its own terms, as the water did not vibrate to the beat as we might have expected (especially if you’ve watched that Adele video) – but despite this disconnect, it managed to create an uncertain intersection between a hovering immateriality and an insistent physical presence. The light shivering with the beat and glancing off the glasses animated the space. Some water had spilled on the ground so that the hive of glasses seemed to be seeping: a delicate, pathetic failure. An interesting text-based piece by Ahmed Nagy, _Performative sentences: Part II of ‘When we are successful, and we will be’ _(2012) presented a series of framed pages bearing text that claimed to represent a compilation of answers to the question: ‘When will you say the following sentence? –– “When I am successful and I will be”’. The question demands a response to a strangely curtailed sentence, ending in abrupt affirmation, which the artist borrowed from a 1991 speech by George H.W. Bush. It summoned a litany of phrases (more effective in the Arabic than the English) that describes a varied set of preconditions for artistic success. The deceptive simplicity of the artist’s approach only contributed to our sense that success operates as a constantly receding horizon, moving from the practical and the elliptical (‘When I possess my own tools’ ‘When my beliefs are in agreement with what I want’) to something akin to a New Year’s resolution (‘When I am not afraid of failure’ ‘When I become more gentle’ ‘When I become a good listener’), with a dose of the fatalistic scattered about for good measure (‘When God wills’).

However, it was Mai Hamdi’s work, _Rotoba _(2012), an Arabic sentence rendered in a generically blockish font and carefully inscribed into the wall, which arguably stood out most for its elegant coupling of evocatively poetic language and spare presentation, and for its thoughtful engagement with its site. The text begins, ‘The dampness suggests the coldness of isolation and the injustice of others.’ Unfurling a sequence of elliptical references, the text managed nonetheless to point back to the viewers who gathered in the small room to read it chiselled into the wall, continuing: ‘Thus heads crowd in a narrow space as if something had once been written there, and had then emerged in the form of bubbles while all were astonished at the smell of the dryness of the earth.’ While the wall at the far end of the room on which the text appeared had been painted white, the remaining three walls retained their rough, untreated surface and earthy tones. A narrow space with high ceilings, the room resonated with the loose-knit references to the ephemerality of climate, text and scent. Hamdi’s work offered a certain pleasure in its precision and materiality, as well as an intelligence in its use of poetic language to describe what may or may not be us looking at the work, some larger metaphor of recent events or a compilation of floating impressions. Then again, what it described may be less important than its ability to stand in for a familiar literary form, one that has traditionally addressed issues of significance, whether political or spiritual.

While Cairo Documenta 2 still felt rough around the edges, it once again appeared capable of capturing some quality that is almost intangible yet definitive of the contemporary moment in the city. Reflecting on the first Cairo Documenta and the 2010 Cairo Biennale, I felt I could discern a preferred logic of art world engagement. Speak to us, it, seemed to say: resonant, specific and insistent, yet without the burden of message. This year, the art world circled relentlessly around a message finally delivered with, it appeared, devastating force, yet which was also co-opted almost immediately to opposing ends. Perhaps the future promises a movement towards an attempt to engage the specificity and open-endedness of communication in a way that exceeds the message as a form. At this particular moment, works that take on the ephemeral offer a certain resonance without necessarily doing the work of interpretation for us.