Posts tagged photography

Rana ElNemr’s Giza Threads: The Ambition of Space - by Doa Aly

I had a dream many years ago. It was set in a big kitchen. I was with a group of friends, none of whom I knew from waking life. 

One of the girls walked to the fridge. She turned to me and asked if I wanted anything to drink. I nodded and squeezed my head and shoulder together; it was a “yes, maybe.” A shrug towards agreement. 

She handed me a glass of something orange; I took it and went to stand outside by the kitchen’s door. As I waited, Raphael (I knew that was his name) came and stood opposite me by the other side of the door. 

There was a long silence, his intense look. Another half-shrug, and eventually he opened his mouth as if to speak. Instead, he let out a filament of blue smoke. It hovered above his head and settled exactly between us. It slowly took the shape of an embryo, suspended in midair, exactly at eye level, translucent blue, slightly fluorescent. “Raphael, what do I do with this?” I asked. No answer. We both waited in equal awe, transfixed by the event.

Dreams are by definition made of unlikely events. However, the event here came to interrupt familiar spaces and gestures, challenging me to accept it as “real,” its very existence depending on my bewilderment. It was an event in progress and I greeted it with a question. The question confirmed its presence. 

An event in progress—in life as in my dream—is a shy proposition, hovering unborn, endearing and most fragile. It is visible, but unfixed like a nagging ghost at the threshold of our perception demanding to be integrated, to be loved. A work of art is never finished in this sense; it is never assertive and confident of its presence. It is hesitant, and that’s why it needs an audience. The hovering breath is not to an audience; it is with and waiting for an audience. 

Very little art today is conscious of the importance of fragility and incompleteness. And very few artists are sensitive to the subtle interactions in the space created by these important motions. 

Rana ElNemr is. In her recent photography series entitled Giza Threads, began in 1999 and exhibited at the Townhouse Gallery, she set out to find the unlikely interruptions in the landscapes of Giza and surrounding vicinity. She photographs open spaces, private and public. Spaces defined by ambiguous ambitions to enclose or expand them. Quiet ambitions tucked in behind fences, or wild ones springing out of tight containers. Every ambition is an event, and every event is a negotiation over—and hesitation with—space. 

There are many events in progress in Rana ElNemr’s photographs. These events slowly take shape before our eyes. Absurd events, powerful enough to drive their own narratives, odd enough to disappear altogether. They are isolated and integrated. They are at the threshold waiting to be seen, nagging. It is the subtlety that if we chose to see them, they reveal themselves and a sense of completeness—a sense of sense in and of themselves. 

ElNemr’s photographs are not cryptic, nor are they illusions of perception. We see the image’s elements very clearly but still fail to comprehend the photograph’s temporal logic. They are images of compressed, fleeting time, and we can only experience them as durations. We are gently led to discover how life pierces through like bamboo shoots imposing upon a new landscape. Plastic flower shops growing on highways. Two axes collapse into one another, the when and the how, the extension of time and intensity of life. Barely contained and barely containing. What remains is acceptance. 

Life here could be as unsettling as one clay flamenco and three mushroom-lamps planted by the side of the road. What happened? Who abandoned the cotton candy? The dinosaur forever fixed in ridicule by the house gate: what is he waiting for if not love? Love, life, whim or necessity, are no longer the only options. ElNemr is not concerned with binaries, side-by-side juxtapositions, or clean-cut distinctions. There are regularities of space and irregularities of ambition, but they are felt at once, whole, emerging entangled onto a single visual plane. 

When one watches intensity and humor—in a place, surrounded by creatures and gestures that seek only to displace time—the viewer finds himself or her/himself to be post-interruption. The various parts of Giza ebb and flow and interrupt each other. We are asked to see through the cracks created by these flailing movements. This vision must be achieved with least bravado and most delicacy. We must stumble upon it, maybe like the artist did. She claims no authority, not even with her compositions, but merely points there and allows us the journey. 

Rana ElNemr, Giza Threads. Townhouse Gallery for Contemporary Art, Cairo

26 February – 4 April 2012

From Berlin with Love

Part of Spring Lessons is not just documentation, but active participation in giving people a voice and finding simple, yet effective ways of doing so.

In this case, noticing that demonstrations in Berlin consisted mostly in a lot of shouting at walls, a team went out to give the participants in a demonstration in front of the German Foreign Office in Berlin the possiblity  to relay their statements directly to Egypt. We shot about 35 15- second segments, recording the name and demand of the individual interviewee.

Thanks to the hard and wonderful work of Kareem Kandiel, who shot and edited this. Marianne Wagdy, translator extraordinaire is responsible for the subtitles.

I hope other Egyptians across the world will take up this idea and emulate it.

[Originally published on CaramK.blogspot.com on November 29, 2011]