WALK INTO the Safarkhan Gallery, in Zamalek, and you are immediately confronted with attractive nudes -- draped not fabric but in Arabic script. You cannot see their private parts, writes Gamal Nkrumah, but you can observe the seductive outlines of youthful figures. There is very little to distract from the beauty of the human form. In a corner, the inconspicuous face of a young woman in hijab rests against the paneling. The artist's buzz-word is discretion. Yet her innermost feelings, her passions, are on display. Marwa Adel is a graphic designer who yearns for communicating her psyche, her being. She feared that conventional art galleries -- those with shop-fronts and walls hung with oil paintings -- would not exhibit her work. The works on show in her tranquil exhibition space when I visited ranged from dramatic projections of her beautiful sister to self-abnegating self-portraits. Marwa says that she communicates by means of visual art skills in order to transfer her understanding of the Arab psyche and her knowledge of Islam through diagrams of the human anatomy. I am impelled to intervene. "But isn't that a contradiction in terms?" Marwa doesn't think so. "Why do people assume that because I wear a hijab, that I have no desires, no intense feelings?" One senses that Marwa's clients are as eclectic as her taste. Her next exhibition, she whispers in barely inaudible lisping, is to portray her husban. "Naked?" She shrugs and smiles. I marvel at her unique stylisation and presentation of Arabic script on naked Arab men and women. She is not interested in exchanging ideas. She wants to communicate.
