Osama Kamal unthreads an unusual artwork that was given a brief public viewing last week It is not every day that one encounters an appliquéd, tent-fabric mural measuring eight metres by five and depicting scenes from the Arabian Nights. Hani El-Masri's work, displayed for the first time in Downtown Cairo, has the feel of a film set that has transcended electronic display to recapture the texture of times past. This mural evokes the world of Shehrazade and Shehrayar, of love and intrigue, betrayal and heartbreak. The One thousand and One Nights, the un-authored, collaborative work of many mediaeval storytellers, speaks of immense wealth and abject poverty, of jinn and the magical world, and also of the mundane aspirations of regular folk and the mad musings of powerful people. It is life taken out of proportions and lifted to a higher plateau, one on which Masri likes to dwell. Masri's hand-stitched mural was recently displayed for one day only in the Rawabet Theatre. It brought a touch of fantasy into a cultural scene that has grown too factual over the past few months or so. Masri is intensely aware that, just like his own life, his piece is unusual. "I am not the kind of artist who shows in exhibitions," he says. "I am an artist of life, so to speak. I draw, paint, design, and make art objects for people around me." Masri placed this unusual piece on exhibition to find out how people will react to it. The oversized patchwork will be feature in an international documentary about The Thousand and One Nights. "I decided to display the patchwork to see how it affects the public, especially since every part of it captures an aspect of the Arabian Nights epic," he remarks. Appliqué, or patchwork, is an old art that some trace back to Fatimid times. if not even earlier. In the mediaeval era, one's worth did not only depend on what one owned in terms of precious metals and stones, but also in terms of the fine fabrics in one's possession. "I decided to work in patchwork because it conveys the Oriental and Islamic mood that is paramount in the Arabian Nights epic," he pointed out. "The Thousand And One Nights is the most important project in my entire life, and Shehrazade is the ultimate woman of fact and fiction. Never in Human history has a woman come close in beauty, intelligence, and perception to Shehrazade." What intrigued Masri about Shehrazade is that she agreed to marry Shehrayar to save him from himself, and to rescue the innocent maidens of her generation from his psychotic episodes. "Ever since I graduated I have been exploring the secrets of the Arabian Nights and wondering what Shehrazade really stood for." The impact of the epic can be seen not only in the patchwork piece aMasri exhibited Downtown, but in other work he has done for the theatre, the cinema, and his many book illustrations, especially of children books. Masri was born in 1951 and graduated from the College of Fine Arts at Helwan University in 1974. While in college, he won several awards for stage decoration, and the year after he graduated stage director Samir El-Asfouri asked him to design the stage set for Tawfiq El-Hakim's play Isis, which was shown in France as part of the Islamic World Festival. It was probably this Isis that spawned Masri's infatuation with mythical characters and fantastical settings. "Isis reminds one of Shehrazade. She is beautiful, bright, kind, protective, perseverant, and cunning. Isis is the one who led me to Shehrazade. My passion for these two characters is one that makes me search for them in every woman I meet," Masri confessed. The nearest that Masri's encounter with fantastical royalty has been to coming true was when Egypt's former Queen Farida came to see Isis and congratulated him on his work. Masri found her disarmingly charming, especially when she asked him to call her by her first name, without formality. After Isis, Asfouri asked Masri to design the sets for the box office hit The Children Have Grown. Two years later, in 1977, stage director Hani Metawa commissioned him to do another big play, Owner Of My Heart by Abdel-Monem Madbouli. The commercials Masri designed for ice-cream products turned the trade name Kimo into a household name. In 1979, he illustrated the immensely popular children's book Al-Shater Mahzuz by Yaqoub Sharoni. His children's book illustrations, which included drawings for some tales from the Arabian Nights, won him several national awards. In the mid-1980s Masri decided to cast his artistic net far from his original shores. A stint in Hollywood put him in touch with the wonderland of American filmmaking. "In 1985, I went to America where I worked in graphic design before landing a job as an illustrator with Disneyland. I then joined Dreamworks, the company owned by Steven Spielberg, as an animation designer," he says. During his stint with Dreamworks, al-Masri had the opportunity to create the fantastical imagery of which he has become so infatuated. In Prince of Egypt (1998), he was able to draw on the visual lexicon which he had accumulated over the years. He says that the Arabian Nights is an exceptional storehouse of historical connotations, since the protagonists move around between Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus and other major capitals of the Orient. Following 9/11, Masri found it increasingly difficult to find work in the US film industry. He returned to Cairo in 2005, where he continues to explore aspects of the legendary world of the mediaeval Orient. "My life in America overlaps in my mind with the tales of Shehrazade. Like the legendary princess, I have ventured into a distant and intriguing world, and did the best I could to survive in it." In his appliqué mural, al-Masri returns to the source of his inspiration, a story that seems to be about one woman but is about life and its vicissitudes, and our attempts to cope. "Shehrazade is not just a beautiful woman who tells stories. She is an oriental icon and a major landmark in our civilisation. The story, which spans the worlds of Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus, has no known author. It is the legend of many peoples, and it develops continually. In my patchwork I only tried to capture its essence, its transcendence of time and place.
