Local conditions, western forms: the 8th International Cairo Biennale presented an uncommon opportunity to study the intersection of Middle Eastern culture and contemporary art - exhibition, Egypt

Art in America, Jan, 2002 by Marilu Knode

The struggle over modernism, representation and identity has reached a frenzied pitch in the Egyptian art world over the past two years. Younger artists--and mature artists outside the "official" or sanctioned art circuit (1)--are producing works with a visual vocabulary and taut conceptual underpinning that express something powerfully local, yet open to the increasingly global cultural discourse. This rift between the "official" and the "new" played out last spring during the opening weeks of the 8th International Cairo Biennale--which bills itself as the largest international art exhibition in the Arab world--and the parallel activities of Al Nitaq, an independent downtown (nitaq) arts festival. The vitality of Al Nitaq contrasted with the conservatism of the Biennale, which, despite some high points, suffered from a general lack of engaged artistic production.

Official Choices

The 8th Biennale included 51 participating countries (the largest number in its history) and 223 artists, 107 of them from the Middle East. The theme this year was "Information Technology," and there were quite a few video installations (as compared with a virtual absence of this medium in prior Biennales). The show was held in many sites around the center of Cairo. On the Opera House grounds (located on Zamalek Island, in the center of the Nile) are the Museum of Modern Egyptian Arts, a former industrial showplace whose major improvement this year was a new coat of paint; the Palace of Arts, a renovated space whose awkward volumes, cement walls and marble floors make hanging or moving art difficult; the El Hanager Art Center, a former storage space; and the Fine Art Gallery within the Opera House complex (though this was never open during several visits). Further north on Zamalek Island is the Akhnaton Gallery, a 19th-century villa with gallery spaces on three floors including the basement, and the Gezira Art Center, a converted palace that houses a collection of Islamic ceramics and offers revolving contemporary exhibitions in the low-ceilinged basement. All these diverse venues accommodated portions of the Biennale.

Artists are chosen for the Biennale in many different ways. The organizers (2) issued invitations to six guests of honor: Pietro Consagra and Fabrizio Plessi of Italy (a country with which Egypt has had a long-standing relationship through its art academy in Rome); Carl-Henning Pedersen of Denmark; Peter Weibel of Austria; and Egyptians George El-Bahgoury and Saleh M. Reda. Participating countries use various methods to select their representative artist(s): some designate a curator, others employ a peer-panel review process, and selectors for many countries are cultural diplomats. This wide range of processes allows for a democratic artistic variety, but the uneven quality of work that resulted was unfortunate. (3)

Different Artistic Time Lines

The Cairo Biennale provokes consideration of how Western critics and curators read the works from the many non-Western countries represented here. While every Middle Eastern nation is culturally and politically unique, artistic production in Arab countries over the last century has generally moved slowly through three stages. (4) First came the introduction of Western academic forms, which began during colonial occupations after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. Although modern art was generally not taught and had to be learned independently or studied abroad, Western philosophy provided an intellectual grounding for ideas of social and cultural resistance. Next, in conjunction with national independence, artists attempted to bridge the gap between modern art and the public. Then came the search for both national and individual artistic identity. At every stage, the tangled web of Islamic tradition and religious prohibition has often dictated how artists are able to express themselves.

Egypt has been, for the most part, the leader in bringing Western artistic practice to the Middle East. In the late 19th century and throughout the 20th, it was the largest exporter of contemporary, Westernized culture in the region, for several reasons: the sheer size and relative wealth of the population; its early exposure to and adoption of modern art; and the volume of films made and distributed, which made Egyptian Arabic the most commonly understood dialect throughout the region. Modern styles and imagery in Egyptian art may seem to reflect a postmodern borrowing of forms, (5) but the mixture is not rooted in an ironic ideology. Modernism and postmodernism are not absolutes, but vary according to specific local traditions. (6) In most of the Middle East, the very making of paintings or sculptures, particularly figurative work, is a radical act in itself. Thus, in Cairo, the Western art world encounters local conditions that seem antithetical to the Western ideas embodied in the forms that the artists are using.

From Beyond the West

The Biennale provided a unique opportunity to see work from Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Palestine (7), Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey (which has quite a different history in its relationship to the West), the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Much Middle Eastern art in the Biennale revealed a combination of older styles of modernism (early abstraction, Cubism). Although the Biennale showed a significant improvement in quality from two years ago, there was still too much substandard, hackneyed work brought in under the largely opaque curatorial process.