Marie-Thérèse Abdel-Messih explores the intermediary spaces afforded by Cairo's metro stations The idea of staging art exhibitions in the Opera metro station flashed into Mohamed Khamis's head on his daily journey to the Opera Gallery he curates. By bringing art and everyday life close together he intended to subvert the claims of superiority attributed to the Modern Art Museum, located within the Opera House premises. And so it is that a group of young Alexandrian artists is now addressing passengers on their everyday journeys. And the value of their art lies not in any complex conceptualisation, but because it acts to break down the spirit of academia, acts as an antidote to the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art and the Opera. The station exhibits have now converted the exit passage into an intermediary space, between the Opera, the museum and every thing outside. The group of young artists exhibiting do not belong to a single school and except for a handful most lack formal training. They are outsiders, utilising everyday materials and familiar signs to push art beyond the traditional discourse of styles; young artists facing up to the complex issues generated by the contradictions of everyday life, everywhere. While the city's back streets are crammed with junk, the main streets have been transformed by transnational agencies and international institutions into a deterritorialised space. The urban citizen experiences must continually translate between high and low, the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic. The distinction between local and global has been blurred, demanding a redefinition of the personal experience in terms of place. The defamiliarisation of once familiar streets, the co- existence of "back street" and "Main Street", has accentuated political marginalisation. The young artists of the 1990s unintentionally overturned a system of artistic categories while expressing existential and political issues. They neither form a movement, nor assume the form of a disciplinary body; they group together while admitting a diverse range of individual creativity. Consciousness of their internal transformation at the level of everyday experience makes them ready for dialogue, for bridging gaps without claiming any revolutionary gestures, nor fetishising their experience. They enjoy their art practice for its emancipatory potential, its ability to reconcile the contradictory forces of everyday life. Mohsen Abdel-Fattah earns his living by working in the field of advertising, a career that has no stylistic kinship with his creations. Like many young artists he is divided between two contexts: the industrial art of the street and that of the studio. His morning job oils the commercial wheel while his art expresses the ambiguities of a world where human forms hang helplessly in the void, weighed down by muted space. The focus is on the faces, mostly existing in pairs, doubling contradictory states experienced by the individual in the everyday. Most of the artists exhibiting are conscious of internal conflict causing divisions, and the self and its double/s configure in the art works of Magdi Habashi, Samir Ahmed Ali, Hani El- Sayed and Mahmoud Meneisi. Their creations produce differing effects, dependent on conceptual interpretations of the "double" that range from psychological to surreal levels. The common denominator among the Alexandrian group is their experimentation with the plastic potentialities of colour through different media. Mohsen Abdel-Fattah first prepares the surface plane by modulating colour tones, working out shades as a primary step to create illuminations that modify the perspective. Ibrahim Tanbuli uses colour to model the spatial planes and outline the figures. Although featureless, their emotional dimension is configured through swirls of colour, creating movement in space. Asma' Youssef's watercolours also suggest movement through colour undulations and tonal shifts, although she tends more towards abstraction. Walid Jaheen, Fine Arts staff member, explores potential transformations of academic categories. His arrangement of fragments on the surface plane is spatially ambiguous, to be viewed from diverse perspectives, thus subverting the principle of any objective mimetic representation of an impassive reality. The fragments are naturalistic in style but their dislocation makes them an embodiment of thoughts and ideas. He makes use of modernist styles like surrealism without encoding his fragments as closed symbols, leaving them open to a variety of interpretations. Space is treated playfully by most young artists to suggest contradictory perspectives, parodying trompe-l'oeil in diverse ways. Medhat El-Karnubi works his two-dimensional surface into horizontal and vertical divisions, forming rectangles in colour, traversed by childish linear figures that seem to be floating about. Zakaria Soliman moves a step further by flouting the idea that the canvas and what is painted on it must be completely unified. His composite paintings, on plywood, are fitted with painted planks on the front and reverse, thus preserving the flat surface, while the attached planks playfully parody foreground and background. By fitting miniature toys onto the lower edge he makes away with the idea of the frame as enclosure. The Palestinian crisis is interpreted as a face behind bars, captured on the canvas by the strips of wood used for birdcages. Soliman is seldom short of handy material that can bring to life the meaning he wants to convey. The use of everyday items in most of the exhibits shows that there is a wide range of possibilities that can create illusion. Mohamed Abul-Magd, a self-taught sculptor, creates fragments of figures in granite, reminiscent of Ptolemaic art. They might be regarded as the product of a collective unconsciousness inscribed in the raw vision of an undisciplined mind. His creations are a tribute to the remote past. Exhibited among a public collection of contemporary art they act as a reminder of a history that cannot be dismissed, forming part of the everyday. One comes across Egypt's historical art remnants in any street in the city; a monumental Ramses remains poised in one of Cairo's most crowded squares. However, the monolithic has lost potency within the contemporary imagination, due to the inaccessibility of massive granite, its unavailability in the local environment. The landscape is now defined by industrial products, or industrial debris, by local consumption of the global. The city streets are littered with disposable objects; the souq, the open market or the popular "mall" where bits and pieces are displayed has become a weekly event. The objects found there may be directly used, or recycled for other purposes. For the artist there is more to capture the eye and strike the imagination. Mahmoud Meneisi, raised in a popular district, has made use of industrial debris to construct a musical band. His skeletal figures are solidly poised, taking after their granite forefathers. In the station gallery they have been -- ironically -- placed against a mosaic mural based on Pharaonic drawings. These hybrid composites constructed from carburetors, radiators, sieves and more, convey a sense of sinister jinnis, parodying the virtuoso tradition of the "orchestra", and the invading scientific inventions. The musical band is playing in counterpoint to an elitist culture, now appropriated by a populist imagination, to become part of the everyday. The generation of the 1990s rejects being subjected to a strict tradition, but claim assimilation in the cultural life. With the help of Esmat Dawestashi, an outsider to his own generation and to institutional administrations, they have created a space for dialogue bridging cultural and generational gaps. For them, a direct response to what has become integrated in the everyday seems more authentic than professionalism. The new generation aspires to live their experience seriously, to be self-absorbed rather than ideological or mystical. The artists excluded from the boundaries of modernism have finally been given a chance to explore their subjectivities.
