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Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy considers herself lucky. Because she has always kept her independency; she does not consider herself a public space or a private space artist. Her creative efforts made her score big success and turn her local acclaim into an international success. Kenawy does
Being the sister of an elder brother, artist Abdel-Ghany Kenawy, early introduced Amal to the local art scene when she was only eleven-years-old. Few years later, namely in 1996, she received the 1st prize in sculpture from Salon El-Shabab that created numerous opportunities for young artists of her generation to surface in a time where there was two galleries solely exhibiting work for established artists. Two years later, while she was still studying in the first year in the Faculty of Fine Arts, she was granted the UNESCO grand prize in the Cairo international Biennial. But being a brilliant art student on top of her class didn’t prevent Kenawy from facing difficulties from her teachers who were envying her success as a rising award winning artists.
Through her full of depth, Amal created for herself that imposed her work as one of the most prominent Arab artists. Contemporary Practices invited Amal Kenawy to take a look back to her portfolio and comments in her own words.
Frozen Memory (2002)
It was the last project I co-realized with my brother Abdel-Ghany after two years of hiatus. I consider it as a turning point in my work as an artist because it was the first time I practiced in the video medium in addition to photography slide show and sculpture. It premiered in the Townhouse then toured the world in a variety of shows including Africa Remix. Frozen Memory looks to the relationship between a human being and the contemporary society where alienated people become part of a mechanical machine. During their daily routine, they are eating alive without tasting any drops of happiness. Their memories won’t even grow as they become opaque objects without past or future and clay figures without souls.
Both life and death are also reflected in it through hundreds of real butterflies, such short lived beings that are burnt by the light they seek.
With Frozen Memory, I started to independently realize my own projects where I wanted to express more personal feelings rather than to focus on only exhibiting in various locations.
The Room (Video Performance-2003)
It was my first project where I started to perform on stage. The Room started as a video and animation project then developed to become an experimental performance allowing myself as an artist to realistically interact with the virtual projected two-dimensional image of the video and an accompanying live music. On stage, my movement was minimally restricted to sew a wedding dress while stitches were pricking a heart (An ornament act interweaving with violence and aggression) in the video images. The heart serves as a symbol of both the mechanical movement and the soul of the human body.
The accompanying vocals were to be performed by singer Leila Samy who wanted to sing while I wanted her to experiment according the video image. Having these creative differences, I decided to replace her with live string music performed by cello player Thomas Jecker.
The Room premiered in the Windows Theatre in the Upper Egyptian city of Minia then toured the world where it was shown in different locations including, Brussels, Jordan and Italy and in variety of art shows, festivals of experimental theatres and film festivals. My favorite location was the open space of a Byzantine Church in Jordan where I was invited last March by Darat Al-Funun, The Khaled Shouman Foundation, to perform a repertoire of my previous work. I succeeded to perform The Room like I first conceived it (At the end of the performance, the dress is burned). In other shows, it was difficult to realize it due to safety reasons.
The Room was also performed in the Italian city of Prato at the Teatro Metasio as part of the Contemporanea Festival 2005). It was selected as one of three consecutive performances in three different halls separated by five minutes walk.
While visiting Cairo, Frie Leysen, director of the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels, came to see one of the performances of The Room that I did in The Factory Theatre of the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. Astonished, she gave me my first opportunity to perform for the first time in a European country where I became part of her acclaimed festival few months later. Many curators, who rely on Leyson's organized premieres, invited me in their subsequent shows.
Leyson will be the curator of Meeting Point 5, due next November, where I will be performing my new project Cairo, Eating Me Inside.
You Will Be Killed (Video Animation-2006)
In Cairo, after I met Fumio Nanjo, the artistic director of the first Singapore Biennale (Belief-2006), he invited me alongside a lot of artists to participate in this inaugural event, which I consider as the best biennale I have ever attended in the last four years.
I had only four months before the event to conceive a new project, which is a crucial thing. I decided to visit the biennale location because I usually do because they represent sources of inspiration. This biennale was located in five different venues including Tanglin Camp, a set of buildings that once hosted a military hospital. When I visited it, I had a lot of mixed contradictory feelings. The hospital is a place where you can witness human weakness which contradicts with the images of war soldiers often related to acts of aggression and occupation. I also felt that the space reflects the history of these buildings. I finally ended to insert my original conceptual plans inside the video installation itself; Images of human memory was projected like a flowing data on the scratched walls. Although I was working on this project during the latest turmoil in Iraq and Lebanon, which drew me to question myself about the meaning of art and creativity in a violent world, I didn’t want to use a kitschy stereotypical approach so that my project could be politically interpreted. I wanted to speak about violence in its abstract meaning which is juxtaposing with wars and battles. Though I started to gather lot of pictures of dead children, I finally decided to use was my own image as a symbolic victim. In a nightmarish sequence mixing paintings and animation, a rat comes along crawling over me, drawing purple blood on his trail. I used non-melodic unsmooth tunes accompanying the stop-motion animation of these disturbing images to thoroughly induce the viewer with a feel of uneasiness.
You Will Be Killed was subsequently shown in the Without Title exhibition in the MuHKA Museum, the Moscow Biennale and the Sharjah Biennale 2006 (Still Life).
Viewed by other curators, the project also inspired a Tokyo exhibition tentatively entitled Drawing in Emotions that will take place in 2008.
As the seventh Sharjah Biennale (Still Life) invited the practicing artists to execute site-specific projects, I was given the opportunity to tour around the old part of the city where I discovered a hundred years old mansion called Beit El-Ansary.
Architecturally, this old house, whose didn’t exist on any map of the city, gave an idea of what the old Emirates used to look like before the skyscrapers.
It took me four days to cover the mansion with pink was metaphor for the intimacy between a m
Fragile to meet and change the of things by making the house of frafile and
Jack Persikian
Booby-Trapped Heaven (Video-Photography 2006)
This project was to be part of PhotoCairo but the organizers found it too controversial because of the nudity images. This drove me to premiere it in El-Mashrabia Gallery in Cairo before taking it to the Dak'Art Biennale where I was granted the Thami Mnyele Foundation.. Another difficulty I overcame in its Cairo's showing was the tight space of El-Mashrabia which isn’t that suitable for video projection. Booby-Trapped Heaven was also screened in first official African Pavilion of the 52nd Venice Biennale 2007
The origin of this project came in form of an invitation I received from Bayar Abou-Saab, chief editor of Zawaya Cultural Magazine, to contribute among other artists and writers, in a group essay entitled Awatan Mofakhakha (Booby-Trapped Homelands). I started to write a short story about a passenger traveling in an airplane around his homeland. But what is a place we can call home? Is it a physical location where we have been born? Or it is a source of cultural heritage on which we have been raised?
I guess a place I call home is a place where I shall feel secure.
In the video, also wanted to point to the airy game they call borderline. Does the barb wire elevate our belonging to a certain land?
My passenger starts to move away of the city. The lights and the buildings are fading away. She is now alone and her sole relation with the world is the reflection of his face on the window of the airplane.
As for the controversy, many critics questioned the use of a female nude body but I was focus on a fat to the semse of beauty
The landscape of buildings Even dreams of heaven has becine fallen aprt
Gender will always be an issue,
Cairo Eating Me Inside (2007)
My next project is called Cairo Eating Me Inside which is conceived as a video performance that would be flexible to be shown in various spaces in nine different locations including Cairo, Rabat, Tunisia, Damascus, Brussels and Berlin. It is simply a continuation of my views towards the corruption of the system and the struggle to find freedom inside the city
In November I will be participating in the African Photography Encounters in Bamako "In the city and beyond". Curated by Simon Njami, this edition will feature New Images found in the work of video artists.
Meeting Points 5 next November for the third time
I cannot speak of my work or myself without mentioning my brother, partner and mentor, Abdel Ghani El Kenawy. Since 1996, we have cooperated on nine major projects involving sculpture, installations and video installations. The Room is my first solo work, and even so Abdel Ghani helped me put it together. He has been a major influence and inspiration on me since I was little, and I have learned more from him than I did during my formal studies.
In the work Abdel Ghani and I did together, we focused primarily on the general laws of nature, the physical laws that unite everything that exists. In doing so, we explored what lies behind the form, seeking the essence, searching for the perfection embedded in the harmony of form and function.
Then I stopped working for a year and half to take care of my son, Yasin. The hiatus was a turning point. I paused to ask: Why do I work and what does art mean to me? I had the luxury of soul searching. Before, I used to create works that refer to existence and infinity, to transformation, to the fusion-taking place within the general entirety of things. Suddenly, my eyes opened to what is inside me, and I concluded that understanding couldn’t take place without self-knowledge.
It wouldn’t help to categorize the work I have already done. I let the concept lead me to the medium of expression. Preparation for The Room consisted of writing semi-daily notes accompanied with some illustrations. I tried to map out the connection between the physical-clinical existence of humans and their private world, explore the world where reality blends with dream, imagination with memory. My aim was to keep track of the dialect between the surface and what lies beneath. This is how I came to sense the existence of a metaphorical room that hides behind the physical body, a room that reflects the much bigger room outside, the one representing society, its customs, its conditioning.
By the time I started the actual work on The Room, everything had come into sharp focus. The music was no longer as hazy as mist, but as powerful as lines of light, surging forth in parallel before positioning themselves to converge. The light glows, forming a structure, then dissipates once again, vanishing in space.
I no longer think of what I do as work, but as a way of sensing life and exploring its meaning without affectation or fear. The Room is not a technical project, but a personal way of breathing.
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