Sayed Mahmoud reviews an assembly of artistic visions The Atelier Al-Qahira is currently holding a group exhibition for some of Cairo's veteran as well as up-and- coming artists. One of the participants, the photographer Wagih George, is showing photographs of the clientele of several Downtown coffeehouses, including Zahrat Al-Bustan and Al-Hurriyah. If you are a Downtown aficionado, you will have no trouble in identifying some of the people. I instantly recognised two familiar faces: renowned novelist Mekkawi Said and fashion designer Yasmine Hakem. "This is the third exhibition presented by this group of artists," George tells me. "The first exhibition was in 1997. It was called Abaad [Dimensions], and it was sponsored by the late artist Nahed Abul-Naga." Hazem El-Mistikawi, sculptor and former director of the Egyptian Modern Art Museum, recalls the days when Abul- Naga ran the Abdel-Moneim Al-Sawy Gallery in Madinat Nasr. "The Al-Sawy Gallery was more about young artists finding their way ahead than about money," he says. A year after the first Abaad exhibition was held in Madinat Nasr, the same group of artists put on another exhibition at the Atelier Al-Qahira. They still named it Abaad and dedicated it to Abul-Naga's memory. These are more or less the same artists whose work is on display today. When I asked what they all had in common, my question was met by a laugh from Suzan El-Masri, the jewellery artist who, together with photographer Adel Wasili, designed a piece for this exhibition. "What bring us together are human values rather than agreement on artistic matters," El-Masri says. "We just like to work together regardless of our different perspectives." El-Mistikawi suggests that the exhibition is a tribute to artistic differences. This view is shared by Wagih George. "We all believe in cultural openness and in sharing artistic experience with other societies," George says. "Many of us have travelled abroad and got in touch with other cultures. So we all know how important it is to declare one's artistic views without fear." El-Mistikawi recalls that the two Abaad exhibitions had one theme, which was the quest for a "third dimension". In the current exhibition, however, every artist is free to choose what to display. Gamil Shafiq is displaying "sketches" in ink and dotted drawings. He calls the collection "Shop Dust", a term borrowed from the late novelist Yehia Haqqi. George explains to me the mood that led him to produce the coffeehouse portraits. "I tried in a recent exhibition to portray people as part of a visual composition. But this time I went for portraits of people whose faces I had become familiar with over the years. It is very unusual for me to do a portrait of someone I don't know." He didn't even edit his photographs. "I wanted to capture the moment as it was." El-Masri tells me that she started working on her entry for this exhibition after she saw a black and white photograph by Adel Wasili that moved in her a sense of nostalgia. She says she was reading Sufi poetry at the time and took her cue from a line of poetry by Sheabeddin Al-Sahroudi (died 1266) that goes thus, "Forever the soul longs for you." El-Masri went on to produce 120 images, each placed in a frame of tinned copper. She arranged them like rosary beads on the wall and called them a "photo-mural". Swiss artist Barbara Graf keeps working on the human body, offering both an anatomical and existential interpretation of its emotions and limitations. "These are not sketches, whatever you think of them. It is the final product," Hazem El-Mistikawi, her husband, says about the pencil drawings that reveal the internal mechanisms of the human body. El-Mistikawi has entered a twin sculpture of two identical pieces governing a repetitive geometrical arrangement recalling the layout of an ancient metropolis. "We have two units here, one in Arabic and one in English, and the six intermediate pieces symbolise the encounter of East and West," he says. Another piece of his is presented in computer graphics and symbolises ethnic diversity. Omar Al-Fayoumi, who presented the Fayoum portraits with which he is completely infatuated, has entered two sizeable pieces. "I now work in oil more than acrylics and focus on large spaces," he tells me. My attention is caught by several paintings by Mustafa Khalil Al-Muslemani, who died last year. The paintings, exhibited here for the first time, are executed on cardboard and show romantic themes. So what do members of the public say when faced with such a range of experimental eclecticism? El-Masri says that, unlike the case when the first Abaad exhibition was held, the public has grown accustomed to seeing new things. The exhibition had no sponsors and the participating artists hope to make frequent use of the Atelier Al-Qahira in the near future. "We want this space to compete with the best galleries abroad," George says.
