A new exhibit at Darb 1718, the Contemporary Art and Culture Center in Old Cairo, brings together Latin American artists to reflect on the relationship between “images, politics and social networks.”
Funded by Artmedia and curated by Sayira Cerdas of Costa Rica, the exhibit’s goals, outlined in press releases, are bold and lofty. “The idea for this exhibition,” it read before entering, “started from a conversation on the Egyptian revolution and how young emerging artists are connected with society by social networks.”
“Are we moving,” it asks, “towards a new freedom, a new power? A network in which governments are left powerless?”
The idea of bringing artists from a different region of the world to reflect upon some the major issues and questions of the Egyptian experience with social networks is novel, but unfortunately, the grandeur of the mission statement does not translate consistently.
The pieces, mostly paintings with a few photographs, videos and sculptures, are thoughtful and inventive. Costa-Rican Fernando Goldon’s painting “Cavity” is an off-white canvas covered in skillfully splotched stripes and curves of thick black paint, which leaves bulbous, shapely openings in the original surface.
The work is beautiful, the possible meanings are subjected to many interpretations and the relationship to social networks and politics is unclear but open-ended.
The problem is that the statements accompanying each piece detract from them. Nearly every statement I read, or tried to read, mixed a language of obtuse, high theory with a sort of stream-of-consciousness writing style that made it very difficult to understand. It was difficult to tell if this was a matter of translation problems or if the ideas themselves were inarticulate, but the effect was distracting.
Goldon’s statement, for example, read; “Social networks are the beginning of a new connection, human. The Unity of human being as a being complete, which protects networked, understood, discussed…” on and on in a torrent of philosophical hubbub, vague verbs and showy nouns that take away from the beauty of the painting itself.
In many of the pieces, the explanations actually make the connection to social media less clear. Still, several works, if one ignored their explanations, are particularly strong. Costa-Rican Edgar Leon, in a piece called “You Text Me,” assembles images of women taken from various video-chat programs looking at the screen, and hence the viewer. The production is simple, but the emotional impact is strong.
Looking at these faces, I was struck by the faux-intimacy and the anonymous voyeurism that pervades many experiences of social media. The political dimension is left undefined, but I found myself pondering the political effects of intimate communion with strangers, and this pondering seems like part of Leon’s plan.
The most compelling piece, however, is by a Nicaraguan artist named Patricia Villalobos. Tucked into the dark, back corner of the gallery, her split-screen video projection shows images of exploding fireworks next to footage of bombs going off. “Triquitracas,” she explains, is an expression used when fireworks go off during a celebration in Nicaragua. The piece “questions the desire not only of individuals, but of societies and nations to destroy,” she writes.
Social media, she is suggesting, juxtaposes the harmless and the trite matters of life and death without warning and without plan, in ways that are potentially beautiful and horrifying at the same time. The power of social networks to link us together under a common political banner will always sit next to the usually banal use of those same networks. Instead of striving for a grand statement, Villalobos renders her comment pointed and articulate, which ironically makes it the most powerful.
“Images, Politics, and Social Networks” is currently on display at Darb 1718, Kasr El-Shamaa St., Old Cairo. Tel: (02) 2361 0511, 010 146 7544.
"Self-Portrait" by Florencia Urbina, in which the artist is laughing at the viewer.
