Cairo Atelier, one of Downtown’s most elegant exhibition spaces, is hosting an exhibition of four Egyptian visual artists working in photography and painting.
The works of Khaled Hafez, Jehan Salama, Amr Mounib and Ahmed El Shaer are presented in separate rooms, as solo shows, yet curated in a manner that bespeaks a cohesive whole. The binding theme for all shows initially seem to be urban life and alienation, yet three of the four shows are subtle enough to sidestep such overt categorization. They convey a shared fondness for sparsity, symbolism and modern techniques. Unafraid of earnestness, they comprise a much needed departure from the empty, trendy works that riddle much of Cairo’s most visible contemporary art scene.
Khaled Hafez
The exhibition begins on the ground floor with Hafez’s show “Extremes: Urban and Ariel Portraits. Hafez’ snapshot-sized photos rest in couplets of three, displayed in large custom cut white matte board. Varying between color and black and white prints, the small glossy photos harken a recent history when folks sent rolls of film to be developed. Something about their scale, dwarfed in their frames, is both sentimental and timeless.
Hafez has mainly chosen an urban landscape devoid of people as his subject. Upstairs, lost in a room on their own, are three matted frames holding images of distant natural landscapes, taken from an airplane.
In his urban subjects, Hafez has captured streets of New York and elsewhere with classic yet dueling sensibilities. For instance; a moment in Times Square shows models in adjacent video screens coincidentally communicating with one another. Another wall contrasts the humorous piece with a graceful black and white image of a baby stroller, gleaming, solitary at night in front of a busy New York diner.
Jehan Salama
Salama’s paintings conjure something at once tropical and urban, a meeting between pop-art and primitivism. They lack, however, the irony of the former and the distant subjectivity of the latter.
Upon entering her exhibition, we are met with portraits. We then take in the artist’s heavy strokes, the way she transforms light and shadows into bold color, thick ridges beneath eyes and cheekbones, where the personal becomes lost to abstraction.
In her larger works, Salama turns from single face studies to overlapping figures dense with symbolism and emotion. Many of the paintings have flurries of small hearts, a gesture which in other cases might be easily reduced to frivolity, but the painter works with integrity to give these icons a voice. Salama appears to work outside of pre-determined genres to express a language of what Cairo photographer Amr Fekry has described as the “contemporary Egyptian experience.
Amr Mounib
In his show “Ordinary, Mounib presents photos of a particular geographical phenomenon – the modern Egyptian farm, built in sand. This farm, with its wild and pre-planned beauty, is a meeting place for the natural and its unnatural trappings.
The water irrigation system for example, is delicately captured by Mounib, rendering a poetic portrait of the thin, stark wheel, unmistakable to the viewer.
There is a photo of a farm girl feeding a cow and another of an adolescent boy carrying water jugs, his face turned toward their weight. Using digital accents, Mounib altered the photos to warmer hues, highlighting humble images of daily life that are neither fetishizing nor condescending.
Mounib has learned to treat human and non-human forms with equity; wheat growing in a field, a cow chewing its cud, and an electric tower standing awkwardly beside a wild desert bush all communicate, without didacticism or value judgments.
What Mounib s frames immediately provide is a natural tender beauty far from the chaotic city they are presented in.
Ahmed El Shaer
It is El Shaer’s work that throws a wrench in what is otherwise a palatable, easily enjoyable show. El Shaer’s presentation of still motion images is the only work that is overtly disturbing at the Atelier, but to the artists’ credit, this is clearly his intention.
He presents a split screen showing diverse images – ranging from science fiction to documentary footage – to pronounce a clear, somewhat apocalyptic message.
In pieces like “I am homesick, a science fiction robot runs through a black and white forest road, armed with a machine gun. To his right, on the other side of the frame, the words “I am homesick appear.
While the work departs from the gentler and aesthetic works of his peers, El Shaer likewise strives to make a comment on the experience of surviving in the contemporary world.
His is epitomized in a fractured, isolated language – a language that exists within the stop motion of video frames. He juxtaposes technical and corporeal realities in an urgent plea. A raw image of a baby being born splits a screen with the image of a product barcode being drawn in magic marker on a woman’s skin.
All in all, the works at the Atelier combine innovation with tested technique. In a rare gesture, the works are socially and geographically pertinent to Cairo.
All four exhibitions are running until Jan. 12. The Cairo Atelier is located at 2 Kareem El Dawla St., from Mohammed Basouny St., Talaat Harb Square.
