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For her contribution to PhotoCairo 4, artist Hala Elkoussy closed off a space on the first floor of the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art and turned it into a private room: Painted and hung with thick red-velvet curtains, the walls were covered with hundreds of photos—some appropriated, some by Elkoussy—of Cairo’s buildings and markets, old movie stars and boys dressed as soldiers and candy-colored flowers, a collection of moments from the city’s (and the artist’s own) history.
On red nails, palm trees and other icons, 2007–2008, was accompanied by a text that related a confusing backstory about a butcher slaughtering camels in the Cairo Zoo, but the installation itself was extraordinarily evocative of a certain Cairene type of display. One person commented to me that the work seems “uncritically nostalgic,” but this might have been part of the point, reflecting a tendency to indulge in reminiscences of bygone glories and tragedies rather than moving beyond them. One could imagine the collector sitting at the small desk in the corner of the room, staring out at the pictures illuminated by chandelier light, studying their images and remembering—like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, facing the past as progress pushes him backward into the future.
Elkoussy’s work stood out in—and stuck out from—the latest edition of PhotoCairo. When it was launched by Townhouse in 2002, PhotoCairo was advertised as the first exhibition in the Middle East to focus solely on photography. More recently, however, the show has been reconceived to equally emphasize video, and this fourth iteration—the first organized solely by the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), and curated by Aleya Hamza and Edit Molnar—was no exception. More than half of the works on view in the exhibition’s four venues were videos, and additional films and videos were screened at the Rawabet Theater, which also hosted lectures and artists’ talks.
Titled “The Long Shortcut,” PhotoCairo 4 sought to explore “the dynamics between informal and official modes of operation,” a concept vague enough that it could embrace a wide range of work. Yet despite the heavy presence of video, photographic installations were among the show’s highlights. Dozens of photographs by Bernard Guillot were displayed in an apartment in the Immobilya building downtown. The French artist has spent decades on and off in Cairo, living in the Hotel Maffet Astoria, which serves as his home, his studio, and his muse. “Hotel Maffet, Cairo” the 1977–2003 series shown here, was beautifully installed: Irregularly cut black-and-white prints were pressed between panes of glass and mounted with thin nails. Empty rooms and ghostly figures, often created through multiple exposures, link the work back to the spiritualist photography of turn-of-the-twentieth-century France and America; hung in three rooms and a long hallway (with an additional photo in the entry), the images also echoed the exhibition space itself.
On view at the CIC, Babak Afrassiabi’s Conversing the Cut, 2005, was one of the more interesting video works. In this lengthy five-channel installation, Egyptian film directors, producers, critics, and censors discuss the issue of censorship, tracing its role through the moviemaking process. Taking another tack, Raed Yassin’s 2008 video The New Film—shown at Townhouse’s Factory space, which was refitted for the occasion with unfortunate drop ceilings and turned into a maze of small white rooms—looks at what is always present rather than what is removed: The twelve-minute montage snappily strings together clips from Egyptian films, from the 1980s to the present, that show President Mubarak’s portrait hanging on the wall. Employers bark at their subordinates as the omnipresent Boss Hosni gazes benevolently down upon them all, both emphasizing and upending the power dynamics at play.
One might have wished for Photo Cairo 4 to be a more tightly curated affair, but the sprawling reach allowed for some of the exhibition’s greatest pleasures. Among these was Corviale, il serpentone (Corviale, the Serpent), a 2001 work by an Austrian artist about an Italian housing project. Playing silently on a small monitor in the middle of the Hungarian Cultural Institute, this documentary-style thirty-four-minute video by Heidrun Holzfeind was quickly passed by many. But those who paused to sit down on a beanbag and put on headphones to hear the punchy Roman dialogue (accompanied by subtitles in English) tended to become so absorbed that they watched it in its entirety. (Holzfeind also contributed a Cairo-specific work for the show, Friday Market [Long Take], 2008—coproduced by PhotoCairo 4—but, sadly, this city does not seem to have inspired her as much as Rome.)
Another productive meander was an evening of films from the archive of the Balázs Béla Studio, which was founded in Budapest in 1961. Selected and introduced by Hungarian curator Lívia Páldi, the short films all revolved around that city in some way. They ranged from a brilliant Buster Keaton–esque social satire (Tuesday, 1963; directed by Márk Novák) to a montage of New Year’s Eve celebrations and messy mornings-after across the class spectrum (New Year’s Eve, 1974; directed by Elemér Ragályi). Although the lecture and films made for a long night—for which Páldi continually apologized—the program was well worth it.
The screenings at Rawabet featured many strong works, including Dance, a 2007 documentary that takes a behind-the-scenes look at the not-so-glamorous life of belly dancers who perform at clubs and weddings. The nearly hour-long work, by first-time filmmaker Celame Barge, dragged toward the end, but it accomplished the tricky task of interweaving the stories of multiple women. Dance was presented by film scholar Karim Tartoussieh, who curated two evenings of video works; he also gave a lecture on the past two decades of media practices in Egypt, discussing how they intersect with issues of activism, censorship, and religion.
In lieu of publishing one behemoth catalogue to capture the multitudes contained in PhotoCairo 4, the curators decided to take an unusual route: They invited three designers and an editor—George Azmy, Ganzeer, Sarah Infanger, and Motaz Attala—to work together as a think tank of sorts called the Publishing House, collaborating with the exhibition’s artists to produce a number of low-budget publications inspired by their artwork rather than directly recording it. Included in this «alternative history» of the show is a booklet that mixes Guillot’s photographs with installation shots, in a purposeful confusion of the space within the artwork and the space of the exhibition site, the artist’s subjects and his spectators.
Another publication is a comic book that imagines the Cairo of the future, an idea that emerged out of conversations with artist Maha Maamoun. Her work in PhotoCairo 4, Domestic Tourism II—The Film, 2008, is a video compilation of scenes from classic Egyptian films that feature the pyramids; however, during her research, Maamoun also discovered science fiction from the period that envisions the same backdrop a hundred years later. Without room to use these in her piece, she bequeathed them to the Publishing House. Azmy’s resultant dystopian drawings, depicting people living in cars on the streets of Cairo, are almost enough to force retreat to the comfort of one’s desk and surrender to quiet contemplation of the past.
Presentation by What, How and for Whom/WHW: Sabina Sabolović, Nataša Ilić, and Ivet Ćurlin. Rawabet Theater, December 19, 2008.
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