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Studio Practices: Susa Hefuna

As an individual and an artist Susan Hefuna’s path has been steered by her cultural DNA.  The daughter of a German mother and Egyptian father, she grew up between a village in the Nile Delta and the German city of Frankfurt: it would be difficult to find two places and cultures in such sharp contrast to one another. These circumstances have lead Hefuna to feel she lacks a single place of belonging.  Creativity is an outlet and a language with which she can express the emotional baggage that comes with such a dilemma and much of her work examines, overtly and covertly, the cultural codes that every person holds. 

Hefuna studied painting at Karlsruhe art academy but following her graduation she felt that she was stalling as an artist and went back to study at the Institute of New Media in Frankfurt.  Here she mastered the latest digital technologies and began to feel more confident as an artist, both technically and emotionally.  She also became adamant that her work should be exhibited in Egypt, at the time an unfashionable contemporary art venue and a decision that puzzled her colleagues.  But for Hefuna, Egyptian culture had become a key influence:  pharaonic elements, Arabian poetry, the architecture in Alexandria and Cairo and the songs of legendary diva Omm Kolthum were all sources of inspiration.  For Hefuna it made sense to show her work there and she did so from 1992 at the Achanaton Gallery in Cairo. 

Although Hefuna’s art had always been an outlet for expressing her in-between context, when she started exhibiting in Egypt and spending more time there, she realised that often she’d been using the signs of her Egyptian heritage in a subconscious fashion.  Working in the region was enlightening and she began to fully understand the many levels on which her work could be read.  Over the 1990s her interest in using “cultural codes” as she calls then, deepened and in tandem her international reputation as an artist grew.

In 1998 she exhibited at the Cairo Biennale, winning a major prize, and met William Wells the week before the opening The Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art.  Susan has subsequently shown here on a bi-annual basis.

At the end of the decade, Hefuna turned to photography to realise an idea based on the old black and white photographs by Lehnert and Landrock that appeared to capture life in Cairo at the turn of the century.  She found an old pin-hole camera and took her own images of “life in Egypt”, developing the photographs on the streets with solutions that would have been used at the time.  The lack of scientific control ensured that every image was different and manipulated by context, rather than computer.  The images appear to capture authentic, old Cairo just as the originals did, but the deception is an old one as we discover that the original photographs were themselves posed, recreated for the western market as a slice of “exotic” Cairo. 

The context in which Hefuna’s work is exhibited has become part of the work itself:  in Germany and the West her photographs, whether of rural life in the Nile Delta or the busy streets of the capital, are usually viewed simply as Cairo, as this is the most common point of reference for outsiders.  Conversely, Egyptians recognise the differences and read the images in a completely different way.

Perhaps Hefuna’s most recognisable work is based on the mashrabiya screens that adorn many old Islamic buildings in the region.  These delicately carved screens were used to aid the circulation of air, refracting light and heat before it entered the houses.  They also served to hide the women, protecting their modesty from the outside world whilst allowing them to survey the scenes beyond them.  Hefuna became absorbed by the abstract nature of mashrabiya patterns and has used photography, drawing and painting as forms of expression.  Again she uses the screens to play with cultural connotations: several of the photographs depict her sitting in front of a mashrabiya in a museum.  In the West these are often read as authentic images of women sitting encased in an Islamic household; whereas those from the region would know that women don’t sit behind such screens any more.

Hefuna’s mashrabiya works on paper have a meditative quality, with two carefully drafted layers of paint denoting her viewpoint if she’d been cosseted in such a room, away from the noise and danger of the city.  Every drawing is different and for Hefuna reflects a particular moment in her context and journey as an artist.  In 2004 she started working with wood and the local wood-turners themselves, designing her own large-scale screens and embedding Arabic and English messages in the patterns.

Between 2004-6 Hefuna came to live in Cairo full time, helping to set up a design faculty at a university, whilst continuing her work as an artist.  In 2006 for the first time she took on the role of curator for an exhibition at The Townhouse Galley entitled Kairotic, working with major artists Mona Hatoum, Karim Rashid and Gary Hill.  This took over a year to prepare but and feted by audience and critics alike.

Most recently Hefuna has worked with large-scale architectural forms.  For the Sharjah Biennale she built a mirrored box in the middle of busy Heritage Square, called “Mirage 07”.  Hefuna played with similar ideas as in her mashrabiya:  during the day the box reflects the sun and heat so no-one can see inside, but at night it becomes transparent as the light disappears.  In the day the cultural confusion of the city is reflected on the exterior walls of the box like a film: the clay houses that surround the square are set against ultra-modern tower blocks; the workers, businessmen, city dwellers and visitors are reflected as they pass by. Hefuna captures a scene that is at once mundane and yet packed with activity.  It is particularly reminiscent of her 100-minute film from 2001 “The Delta” when Hefuna set up a camera at a crossroads near the family home and let the camera run.  The resulting footage is for the villagers a mundane depiction of their lives; for Caireans, many of who rarely experience this rural Egyptian life, it is an exotic document; and for Europeans the film is a fascinating fulfilment of an Egyptian idyll with palm trees, donkey carts and timeless activity – far removed from the images of regional conflict that usually fill the TV screens.

In October this year Hefuna’s work will be sold in the first ever auction of Arab work at London’s Sotheby’s.  In December she will have a solo exhibition at The Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, “Knowledge is Sweeter that Honey.”  It seems that Hefuna’s in-between perspective of western and Egyptian culture has allowed her to act as informed commentator.  Taking nothing for granted she absorbs her environment, history and the aesthetics around her, translating what she sees and feels in a way that establishes a dialogue with the viewer and gently probes our own cultural preconceptions.