It's your life Charlie Brown

The Nitaq festival in downtown Cairo opened last week. Al-Ahram Weekly takes a look
It's your life Charlie Brown
Youssef Rakha and Nur Elmessiri explore dimensions of space
Last Thursday saw the opening of Nitaq, the annual, downtown gallery-focused arts event, now in its second, expanded incarnation. Nitaq is an ambiguous word in Arabic meaning strap, range, enclosure, and most poignantly, Orion's belt. Geographically, Nitaq describes a tentative triangle bordered by three downtown thoroughfares: Tahrir St, Sherif St and Champollion St. Visually, it was supposed to operate both in and out of doors; yet except for a banner encircling the top of Groppi's and posters outside most, not all venues, the latter dimension is nowhere in evidence. On the opening night, however, the absence of outdoor art did not prevent Nitaq from generating rare gallery-going energy.
Such energy explains the ineffable, barely perceptible transformation that beset the streets. Orion's belt is one thing. It is quite another to be able to walk downtown at night, holding a bright pink blow-up bunny and a camera, and not feel out of place. For three hours at least, droves of art lovers -- perhaps they were merely event lovers -- charged quietly among the crowds, bunny in hand, appearing and disappearing as they slipped in and out of venues. They included: "intellectuals" normally to be found at Grillon and Zahrat Al-Bustan, conventional-looking middle-aged men from Heliopolis and Abbasiya, arts students in packs, cultured European expatriates, downtown aficionados from across the class spectrum and several dozen Western-educated young men and women about town. Under the subtle yet unmistakable influence of Nitaq, the trip from Townhouse Gallery to Mashrabiya Gallery -- by way of any or all of a dozen more venues within walking distance -- assumed a feebly momentous dimension. Bunny and camera alike seemed like the gadgets of a magic world enticing the usual downtown crowd into its folds.
This realm might sensibly be identified with art. Yet the creative intervention in question was more about what art can do to its surroundings than about the art itself. Ahmed Nosseir, whose paintings occupied the whole of Espace Karim Francis, employed thick, haphazard brushstrokes and aggressively arbitrary colour schemes to rework a theme involving three witches and a threatening sky, over and over. On the first floor of the Townhouse, Amina Mansour's multi-media, three-dimensional objects might have been quaint and evocative, but Mona Marzouq's acrylic paintings and geometric, space-age sculptures -- in white or fluorescent colours -- were far too stark and simplistic to be interesting. At the Mashrabiya, Essam Marouf's female figures -- employing an impressionist technique to achieve something closer to Pop Art -- looked like diffuse, subdued posters, seen through an overcast screen. They comprised many versions of the same painting: a sad, detached and dreamlike vision of impossible womanhood.
Installations captured the mood of the opening night and the dynamics of Nitaq -- its more engrossing aspect -- more effectively. In the Townhouse alone, Shadi El-Noshokaty, Hassan Khan and Wael Shawqi dealt respectively with family history, personal identity as an aspect of everyday life and the clash of indigenous and contemporary culture. Constructed respectively in white, black and grey, all three installations incorporated elements of Egyptian culture, employed video and invited the viewer to explore and discover. Each offering comprised an invasion of the space available to it, an attempt at virtual reality in which sheer magnitude was instrumental. Across Mahmoud Bassiouni St, by contrast, Lara Baladi's feeling for one abandoned and decrepit floor of the old Viennoise Hotel was passive and unobtrusive. The space was effortlessly transformed into a dim reservoir of hackneyed, mostly Western mementos. In the brightest room, Baladi placed her trademark photographic collage, parts of which reappeared elsewhere, blown up and isolated. As one roamed, apparently purposelessly, fellow viewers turned into shadows, and appeared to be part of the installation. A giant pink blow-up bunny leered over the shoulders of one man, rising above dozens of identical little bunnies: pass the man and he will hand you one.
In the Goethe Institute gallery, alongside Dina El-Gharib, Khaled Hafiz, Sabah Naim and Sami Elias, Mohamed Abla's variations on the theme of matrimony were less inspired than his wedding anniversary celebration -- a unique open-air "installation" that occurred simultaneously outside. To coincide with the opening, Abla organised a conventional wedding, complete with kosha (the "throne" on which the bride sits next to a formally dressed groom), bridal dress and (deafening) popular band. For those to whom Greek Club fare ("Electronic, Folk and Rap Music") might have been too artsy, the spectacle of Abla dancing to traditional wedding numbers and recent pop hits was the alternative.
It was a lot of fun, this dashing about, this doing of the circuit, this being an atom, an iota of energy in the Orion's belt (nitaq) constituted by spaces configured and joined by familiar faces. Although the clubbiness of it all did occasionally get a tad too smug, the Nitaq -- galleries, cultural centres, spaces (in Groppi's, the Viennoise, the Gresham) temporarily opened up once again to the breath of life (love, warm hellos, genuine good-to-see-yous, catty remarks and, most of all, palpable hard work, loving effort, toil and anxiety) -- was beautifully embedded in the wist el-balad of Cairo that the wist el-balad (downtown) crowd so love. Catty remarks included a friend greeting another with "Darling you're probably the nicest thing I will have seen this evening," an aquaintance telling another "It's all so moving, isn't it?" within earshot of someone with a maudlin propensity to feel moved, and an artist remarking that another artist's work was "Frieda Kahlo without the irony." The cattiness, though, was borderline: tongue in cheek -- but not; damning with faint praise -- but not.
What pray tell is an installation? Lucy of the Peanut crowd, Linus' bossy sister, lover of Ludwig (and hence of music, and hence of the arts), erstwhile cruelly realist therapist would -- should Charlie on one of his 5-cents-a-visit sessions pose the question -- answer: "It's your life Charlie Brown." A late Elizabethan genius in one of his bleaker moods said about life that it was "a tale told by an idiot;" on another occasion, suspending value judgement, he dubbed the world a "stage." "Life," a late Victorian playwright, essayist and author of children's stories said, "imitates art."
Opening night of the Nitaq Festival, itself an installation of sorts, was a "production" blurring the lines between art and life, theatre and the quotidian, private space and public space. Downtown Cairo, magnanimous as ever, allowed it all to unfold, festively and unobtrusively at the same time. Groppi regulars drinking tea did not bat a lid, as if it happened every night this streaming in of artsy trend-setter types into the restaurant space that had been closed for years and that had now been turned into a stage fit for Sinatra. And in the Goethe car park arty and non-arty alike legitimated Mohamed Abla's performance? wedding? wedding anniversary? by sitting in the wooden chairs, drinking tea, wishing the couple alf mabrouk -- and enjoying themselves and the loving spirit immensely. Thousand-year-old Cairo hosted an it's-as-contemporary-as-you-can-get arts festival as if she had been doing this sort of thing from the day she was born. And, in many ways, she has: she is, after all, as some of her lovers know her, the Queen Mother of all installations.
Our point of departure was a beautifully recently repainted interior which was not so precious that one could not have a good laugh within its walls. Have a good laugh we did -- about ourselves, about the concept of "installation." What, one thought, could be more endearingly contrived, more impossibly fabricated than a home lovingly put together, a life lived on the straight and narrow path between illusion and reality, so brief (one-act, one-man) and yet so overloaded with meaning?
A home is an installation, a stage upon which one manifestation of the hard work of living unfolds, the props of which (bits and pieces, things acquired, notes hastily scribbled, newspaper clippings) survive the passing away of the magpie-like bricoleur who had put the thing together. This much was suggested a couple of summers ago by Pierre Sioufi's Passe temps (pastimes) art happening which had taken place in the staircase of his home, an edifice on Tahrir Square.
A home, the place in which one instals oneself, is a gallery of sorts; conversely, given the right spirit, a gallery can be a home. One felt at home in Nitaq and, in the light of the hard work involved in getting the Nitaq thing together, one was glad to be at home, in Cairo, on its streets full of signs which may be followed or -- as in Dina Gharib's witty collages and Sabah Naim's art work carefully wrought from such "refuse" as old newspapers -- enjoyed simply for their formal properties.
Festive Nitaq was -- and beautiful. And, thanks to the more troubled works (for example, Hassan Khan's video installation, Bassam El-Baroni's paintings), it did not get so charming that one forgot the underside of all the gaiety. For every moment of glamour, a grimy man-handled banknote; for every sated Greek Club reveller, an empty stomach; for every one of "the beautiful people," a distressed, grieving soul; for every "I", a host of dearly departed; for every writer waxing lyrical about feeling at home on the streets of Downtown Cairo, a homeless family, a jobless father, a refugee.
Something about Cairo that does not allow one, even while revelling in it all, to forget the facts of life. And thank God for that.
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(For Nitaq festival details, see Listings)
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