With just a few minutes to go before the opening of Darb 17 18, Cairo’s latest contribution to the national contemporary art scene, things were not yet quite in place.
While a gaggle of invited artists smoked and chatted in the street on Sunday night, workmen were busy inside the plush new art center, installing technical equipment and hanging pictures on walls.
The opening exhibition at Darb 17 18 involves works of video, photography, painting and sculpture from both Egyptian and international artists, and is set to run until February 2009. Titled Traversées (Crossings), the show has required the transport of a great deal of equipment and artwork from Europe and elsewhere. Rather ironically, much of it was stuck in transit through Cairo Airport’s customs system.
Hitches to one side, this opening event appears to have hit the mark in terms of the center’s stated aim of promoting the Egyptian contemporary art scene while providing links with artists from abroad. Mixed among the Egyptian contributors were visiting artists from as far afield as Senegal, Lebanon and Finland.
And once the doors were opened at last, the invited guests seemed sufficiently impressed with the works on display. Among them were stunningly lit photographs from Moroccan artist Mohamed El Baz, whose snapshots of life provided a bright charge of energy in the first room.
Around a corner, Khaled Ramadan from Lebanon showed a video cataloguing the destruction of the suburbs of Beirut by Israeli forces in the summer of 2006. Further on, Adel Abdeen from Iraq showed a video installation involving a series of children applying foam to a balloon in a barber’s chair, then attempting to shave it with a cutthroat razor. The bursting of the balloon each time, though not a great surprise, nevertheless had viewers jumping out of their skins.
The Traversées show was originally shown in Paris in the spring of 2008, although many of the works on display in Cairo are new. The curator Brahim Alaoui was present for the opening night at Darb 17 18, and took time to explain one of the key concepts behind the show.
“It is very difficult now to find any national artwork which is isolated from influences from the rest of the world, he told Daily News Egypt. “This is mainly due to the shrinking of the world in terms of media. Every artist is receiving impressions from around the world, and this results in an exchange of influences.
“In a way, Egyptian art now is a melange of influences from everywhere.
As the exhibition literature points out, the Traversée concept also incorporates the notion of crossing between different artistic media, as well as from realism to realms of fantasy.
As a physical structure, Darb 17 18 is a work of art in itself. Located in the Fustat district of Cairo, just behind the Coptic Museum, the building appears to combine traditional Islamic architecture with cubist influences. In the adjacent garden is a domed mud-brick structure that might not look out of place deep in the Sahara.
The brains behind the center is Egyptian artist Moataz Nasr, whose links with this particular corner of Fustat go back over a decade. At that time, Nasr worked from a studio among the area’s sprawling and ramshackle collection of potter’s factories. When the authorities demolished the potters’ community on the grounds that it was constructed illegally, Nasr approached the governor of Cairo and suggested its replacement with a new artistic community, built with government funds.
The governor agreed, and today Darb 17 18 stands as the crown jewel in a rather fetching assortment of studios and a thriving creative community.
“We need more than a thousand places like this in Egypt and the Arab world, Nasr told Daily News Egypt. “We need to encourage a real discussion about art so that everyone can move towards understanding himself better.
“Contemporary art is exactly about what is happening around us, he continued. “As an artist in the Middle East you go to bed with politics on the television and newspapers, and you wake up with it.
“There are no limits now on how you express yourself. Your body can be your materials, and the sky is the limit. You can use any medium to express yourself.
While the finishing touches were being put in place, guests attended a panel discussion in the garden, where the art curator explained that, the strength of contemporary art is to destroy all boundaries and find new ways of looking at art and humanity, in a reference to an impromptu performance by one ofthe attendees preceding the discussion which left everyone a bit surprised.
Later in the evening guests were greeted by a song from a brightly-lit artist standing atop a residential tower block some 500 meters away. A hush fell over the crowd, which had by now begun to expect the unexpected.
For more information go to: www.darb1718.com
