At an exhibition of discarded dolls in Cairo, Rania Khallaf recalls the faces of her own childhood dolls "Doll" is a weird word. When you hear it, it strikes a chord, taking you back to a set of memories, good and bad, happy and sad. It is a powerful word that has joy in it, as well as pain. Dolls have been around since the dawn of history, though they have developed in different ways. It could be this magical, historical dimension that gives the word its sweet ambiguity. Danish artist Lise Allam's latest exhibition, entitled "Dolls" and now at the Al-Gezira Art Centre in Zamalek in Cairo, perfectly illustrates the unique relationship between a girl-woman and her dolls, elaborating the identity of the dolls as if they were human beings. The exhibition, which boasts 66 oil paintings of various sizes, including drawings and additional pieces in different media, explores the theme of shared human experience by focusing on modern society's relationship with what Allam calls the "human doll." It comes as part of a series of well-received exhibitions in Egypt and Denmark during Allam's ten-year career as an artist. Allam made the transition into painting more than a decade ago after a successful 30-year career in textile designing in Egypt, where she has lived since the 1980s. Visiting the exhibition, one cannot help but give out a big smile, or even a grin, on looking at the paintings. They give you the sense that you are walking in an orchard of fruit, or walking happily while the sun is standing in the middle of the sky, shining down on you. Here, you return peacefully to your memories, recalling the names you once gave to your own dolls, as well as the fights with sisters and friends over favorite ones. How nostalgic! The bright colours in the paintings help to refresh the memory. However, the story is not so simple, since the dolls portrayed here are dolls that have been discarded, "street dolls," if one could say so, dolls that have lost their heads, arms or legs, dolls with missing eyes. Why do we discard our lovely dolls, dolls that we once hugged and sang songs to? Where do our dreams go when we grow up and forget about our childhood dolls? "The idea jumped into my mind six years ago, after I had finished an exhibition that tackled the rather confusing relationship between a daughter and a mother when the mother grows older. I wanted to explore something new and a bit strange," Allam said in an interview with the Weekly. "One day, I saw a Japanese doll that caught my eye, and I started working on some paintings that took many shapes, but the idea was still irritating me. I did not have any dolls at that time, so I thought I needed to have dolls." "A friend of mine brought me 30 discarded dolls from the El-Goma'a Market, a popular market for used things in downtown Cairo. Here, I found what I really needed -- the hopes and dreams and all the secrets of little girls that had been discarded along with their dolls." Allam's concern was to explore this paradoxical relationship between girls and their dolls. Girls are encouraged to treasure their dolls when they are children, and then, when they become teenagers, they are taught to discard them and treat them as worthless. Yet, "by discarding our dear and intimate things, we are discarding our wishes and positive feelings, as well as some of our sensitivity," Allam believes. "I will never forget my favourite large doll that my father gave me when I was three years old. I kept it in my room until I was 18, and then I gave it to my neighbor's daughter. To this minute, I really regret giving it away. If I still had it, it would have reminded me of the good old days when I sat in the garden with my friends, singing and dressing and playing with dolls." However, Allam's attempts at retrieving such discarded dolls did not take her outside Cairo. She wanted to explore the unique relationship between Egyptian girls and their dolls. "Strangely enough, I did not find a single doll with brown skin or black eyes. They all had blonde hair and green or blue eyes. Isn't this a bit strange," she asks. "When I first got the dolls, I classified them, checking each one over; talking to it, figuring out that each doll was different from the next. Each doll has its own personality given to her by her owner. I used to give them names and talk to them, caressing them as if they were babies. It was partly a nostalgic thing." "After making a number of sketches, my ideas for the exhibition developed, and it was as if I was portraying a human being -- the marks we gain as we get older, for example, both from the good times and the bad." One eye-catching painting in the exhibition portrays a headless doll wearing a clean short white dress, a yellowish butterfly hanging above her as a replacement for her lost head. "Butterflies," Allam explains, "are fleeting creatures. They have a very short life, and in this they share one quality with dolls. These were once part of your life, and then after this short period they never reappear in your life again." One of the most fascinating paintings in the exhibition, a large oil-on-canvas work, features a thrown over-doll with one arm and a pierced eye, together with a coloured marionette tied with string and ready to move if you pull it. A group of eight pictures, each 30x30 cm, adorns one of the exhibition's walls. These feature dolls that look like babies, each having a different personality, each telling a different story about herself. If you give yourself space to meditate, you might be able to hear these dolls complaining about their fate, or wondering where their owners have gone. Since Allam is a former textile designer, one might have expected her to use collage or different media rather than oil paint. "I have moved completely to painting. I have no passion anymore for textiles," Allam comments. "Oil is a living, deep medium. I thought it would do a perfect job here." The exhibition, running through 18 October, also features sketches of earlier works. "The exhibition is a product of several years' work, and I was keen on recording the process of thought in each stage. I was sleeping, eating, dreaming dolls." "Each painting has a period of thought, a set of sketches, a process of colour selection, and a story behind it. Whenever I had an idea, I grabbed the first piece of paper I found and drew sketches. Sometimes it was on old envelopes, and sometimes it was on the notepad next to the telephone. Finally, I thought I'd exhibit my sketches as well, since I think it's important to know where the ideas of the paintings originated," Allam said. Along with the pictures, the exhibition includes three dirty, naked and broken plastic dolls, each in a glass box. "They are special dolls," Allam explains. "I wanted people to notice how unique they are. I also wanted to give them a chance to reflect on their characters and speak up." "My next exhibition might be a continuation of the present theme, but with a different approach. I will never give these dolls away, now that they are part of my life," Allam says with her characteristic smile.
