This year the Aswan International Sculpture Symposium provides exclusively for its own veterans, reports Reham El- Adawi. In this, the 10th anniversary round only sculptors who have taken part in previous rounds are participating, be they Egyptian (Nagui Tadrous, Essam Darwish, Sherif Abdel-Badie, Hassan Kamel, Vivian El- Batanouni, Ahmed Qaraali) or foreign (Leonard Rachita from France, Manuel Torres from Spain, Rene Kung from Switzerland, Sissel Berntsen from Norway, Ton Kalle from the Netherlands). Carefully selected by sculptor Adam Henein, the founder and commissar of the symposium, they come from the four corners of the earth. Remarkable too is the only exception -- sculptor Sabri Nashed, who is working with granite for the first time in his life as the symposium's guest of honour this year -- at the age of 68. Running through 25 March, this year the event will add not only to the contents of the Open-air Museum but to several public squares in Cairo, Aswan, Luxor, Edfo, Alexandria and Al-Mansoura -- an endeavour undertaken in cooperation with the Cultural Development Fund. A major sculpture by Torres, for example, will be placed in Al-Azhar Park, while Luxor will boast the Ancient Egyptian-inspired work of Tadrous, and Al-Mansoura that of Sherif Abdel-Badie. Ten years into one of the most impressive events to have graced the cultural sphere, artists are complaining of the limited budget -- which hindered efforts to bring a greater number of foreign sculptors to Aswan, among other problems. According to Sherif Abdel-Badie, the financial award given to artists -- LE3,000 -- has not been raised once in ten years. Recently, he added, the symposium has come to face competition in the region, with Emaar International Symposium in Dubai and others in Syria and Lebanon: "These symposia offer very high financial rewards." Tadrous, another artist who witnessed the progress of the event over ten years, stressed the need to intensify exchange with the aforementioned symposia: "There should also be some kind of coordination with other symposia in order to avoid overlaps in time -- as was the case this year with the Dubai Symposium, for example." He also suggested that the symposium should extend its sphere of activity beyond Aswan to Hurghada and Sharm El-Sheikh where dark red and rose granite is abundant. On a more positive note, sculptor Hani Faisal, the deputy commissar, insists that artists around the globe are still very eager to participate; they never thought of lack of money as a reason not to attend, he says, adding that many artists fall under the spell of Aswan, whose nature and history are exceptionally compelling. It is high time for the Open-air Museum, which contains a huge number of masterpieces -- all created by symposium participants -- to see the light of day, he went on: "Street signs should be placed on the way to the museum to guide visitors to its location; pamphlets or brochures should be distributed at the Nuba Museum to make tourists aware of the existence of such an original venue." More significantly, perhaps, Faisal believes the symposium to have played a vital role in producing a new generation of granite sculptors, "enabling them to benefit from interaction with their peers and granting them opportunities for exposure at other symposia" in, among other places, Belgium, Spain, Lebanon, Syria, Italy and Yugoslavia. Kalle, for one artist who participated in the Dubai as well as the Aswan symposium, notes that the latter is different in that it involves many more local sculptors (compared to Dubai's 20 per cent); some 80 per cent of Emaar's participants, he added, are really businessmen seeking profit rather than art. Kalle also commended Henein's ability to understand the needs of each artist; not only is he a sculptor himself, but the whole event is his brainchild. "The Emaar Symposium invites 80 artists -- 40 painters and 40 sculptors -- so competition is fierce," Kalle explains; "artists are always pressed for time because the event only lasts two weeks -- and they work to win the first prize, which is very financially rewarding." Kalle is not interested in a financial reward; for him the true value of the Aswan Symposium is the creative process. For his part Darwish, who won second prize at Emaar for a sculpture entitled Together, believes that artists should have the right to sell their work to the private sector. The Aswan Symposium injunction forbidding artists to sell work produced for the symposium, he said, is "very unfair".
