Egypt, my Egypt

Youssef Rakha notes a national emphasis creeping into private galleries
While Espace Karim Francis offers the opportunity to encounter a range of contemporary Egyptian art, galleries like Duroub and Arabesque have been showcasing a sort of artistic Egypt.
Elusive, restrictive and variously disguised, this creature could nowhere be better described than in the deliberately emphatic title of Thierry Gicquel's photographic exhibition at Arabesque (which ended last Saturday): "Mon Egypte à Moi."
Indeed.
Thierry's Egypt, depicted in uniformly large black- and-white prints, turns out to include photojournalistic portraits of, among others, singer Mohamed Mounir, actors Mahmoud Hemieda, Hanan Turk and Yousra, auteur Youssef Chahine and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Images of peppercorns, traffic-jostled streets and the façades of buildings are equally low-key, although Thierry's Egypt does afford the rare moment of verisimilitude. Sprawled across the back of a mini-truck in motion, average Egyptian man reclines comfortably, easily: not a care in the world. Yet even here there is nothing particularly à-moi about the Egypt that comes through, only the unpretentious and observant lens of someone with a penchant for the unusual or rather the unusual-looking.
The tendency to unduly romanticise an individual and intimate attachment to Egypt, however, seems rampant in what has been on offer this month.
Ending the previous Saturday, at the Khan El- Maghraby Gallery, drawings by Fathi Afifi, paintings by Omar Abdel-Zaher and the omnipresent George Bahgory, under the title "The Wedding Party," focused on evoking grass-roots festivities. Safarkhan has Nazli Madkour indulging in "Nostalgia" until 10 May, while at the Cultural Cooperation Centre Ali Dessouki's paintings and batik, inspired by "Popular Art," will be taken off the walls later today.
In all of these offerings the mon-Egypte tune, is eagerly being sung, though at a variety of volumes, some loud, others less so. Beside the proliferation of foreign exhibitors at the start of the sleepy summer season (the AUC Falaki Gallery, the World of Art Gallery and the Centre of Arts all offer non- Egyptian work), the bulk of shows seek to justify particular artistic practices in specifically "Egyptian" contexts which are not exactly part of the kind of day-to-day imagery partially and eclectically captured by Thierry.
Of all the exhibitions that have been on offer, the Picasso Gallery's double bill of drawings by Gamil Shafik and sculptures by Halim Yacoub (also ending today) is the least representative, the most far- fetched of the nationally oriented offerings. Monochromatic, contorted, laden with symbols: the work of these two artists, who parallel rather than complement each other, nonetheless draws on a semi- figurative tradition whose flavour fits snugly, if not enticingly, on the mon-Egypte platter.
This is the inner, psychic aspect of the same overriding concern: to present a private realm to which the artist has exclusive access and through which he purports to examine the identity of the nation, a very threadbare strategy. Certainly Shafik's long- standing contribution as a magazine illustrator -- it is to the world of print illustration that these drawings belong -- has engendered a peculiarly modern iconography of Egypt, yet another (Coptic) incarnation of the aforementioned artistic creature that visually represents its context. (Thanks to this specific imagery Egyptian magazines remain identifiable as such at the merest glance, though this is not, given the means of identification, automatically a good thing.)
Another extreme is represented by Hassan Abdel- Aal, whose 2002 Duroub exhibition will go on until the second week of May. Except for the odd cityscape Abdel-Aal offers straightforward paintings of women: faces and half-figures which, in their trademark features and carefully stylised costumes, pursue the essence of Egyptianness in the female form. Although no more representative than Shafik's fish and horses, Abdel-Aal's women scream equally loudly "Egypt, my Egypt," if in a more direct and reductive tone. In doing so they attempt to justify a not overly convincing selection of paintings that might, otherwise, be devoid of any interest.
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