I get off the bus near Al-Ahram Newspaper’s offices in the Ramses neighbourhood at around noon and make my way across the street and underneath Al-Galaa Bridge where street vendors sell anything from clothing to food items. As I navigate through the busy streets around people and cars, I think about the COVID-19 pandemic and I wonder at the countless Egyptians who need to pass through these crowds to make a living every day.
As I approach Cinema Radio, there’s a room to my left where I find a collection of furniture. I see a set of round double reflection mirrors, each divided down the middle –either horizontally or vertically– into two sections, each offering a different reflection. Below them is a cabinet set named Isfet, which, in ancient Egyptian culture, represents “chaos and darkness,” the opposite of another piece of hanging furniture named Maat, which represents “order and light.”
When I, like many others, joined the vinyl resurgence in the early 2010’s, I migrated to the tightest corner of the store, housing reissues and compilations of forgotten gems: Sudanese jazz, Senegalese funk, the fury of Afro-Colombian vallenato. The sleeves were bold and colorful, promising buzzwords popping from the cover.
Record store finds (except for album covers photographs are the author’s).
In the intervening decade, the convergence of a growing audiophile culture focused in Europe, Japan and North America, the explosion of online radio stations and the investigative potential of social media have brought record-digging culture into another realm. A new generation of listeners are hungry for novel sounds and more discerning about the origins behind the albums, as equally interested in the musicians’ backstory and placing the work in a broader musical history as the record itself. Like clockwork, a growing industry of established outlets in Europe such as Strut and Soul Jazz Records as well as independent labels like Matsuli Music have sprung forward to meet this demand.
But most of these Western labels are firmly rooted outside the communities they mine for music; listeners, aficionados and the artists themselves are starting to question the neo-colonial tensions underpinning the production, marketing and consumption of these records. Who makes this music? Who listens to it? Who profits?
The view upon entering Elshahed’s “Cairo Modern” exhibition at New York City’s Center for Architecture. Most of the featured photographs have been reprinted from al-Emara magazine.
On a tree-lined side street just around the corner from Washington Square Park – and close enough to Zooba, the hip Cairo- and now New York-based Egyptian street food restaurant, to warrant traipsing over for lunch– scenes from everyday life in Cairo are on display at New York City’s Center for Architecture.
A backlit black-and-white image at the center of the room shows a woman in a striped shirt and knee-length skirt, flanked by palm trees and bamboo lawn furniture, the sort that’s still ubiquitous at sporting clubs and cafés across Egypt, posing for the camera on the Nile’s Mounira Island. A thirty-one-story high-rise towers in the background. Another image shows a pair of students seated in those same bamboo chairs on the lawn outside the American University in Cairo’s six-story Science Building, its large glass windows protected by an elaborate brise soleil.
Panel from Cairo Modern. A pair of students talk on the lawn of the now-demolished AUC Science Building. When the university moved to a new campus in New Cairo, it sold off valuable land downtown allowing for such demolitions. This type of distinct architecture has not been preserved well in twenty-first-century Cairo.
While the scenes feel timeless, the focus of the exhibition is not the characters at all. Instead, the focus is on the built environment they inhabit. The images have been brought together, in part, to challenge the anthropocentrism of history and underscore the impermanence of modernist buildings in this city on the Nile. The Sabet Sabet Building, built in 1958, which rises in the background of the image from Mounira, still stands in Garden City. But the Science Building on AUC’s downtown campus, designed by architect Medhat Hassan Shaheen and built in 1966, has been abandoned and demolished, victim to what academics callCairo’s urbicide.
Content Warning: This exhibition review includes mention of revolution, police brutality, surveillance, the military and other forms of state violence.Images also containsimilarly sensitive material.
All photos are credited to Yaman To’meh.
The Exhibition: Arab Comics Today, 2021
In the presence of defined spatial memory, comics are the art form for expression: Each designated frame expresses a certain memory , with the blank spaces between the panels suggesting causality or sequence. Comics become a mapping of the bodies: an archive recording space and time with the complexity of the events documented. Comics are a form of preservation of the particular event being depicted within an intimate diary-like frame, especially when drawn by hand; they are a testimony to the artist’s archive of memories, a frozen moment to resurrect and to be built upon reality as it forms.
In 1938, Sarola Kasar, a village on the western peninsula of what is today known as India, arranged its annual fair in honour of Nirgunshah Auliya, a fakir, an ascetic, venerated by local Muslims. A British survey of the village says the band of musicians and tamashas (theatre troupes) hired for the event commenced only after 10 PM. Despite the fact that tamashas in the region had for long been a vibrant and spontaneous art form which embodied the spirit of social change and still do, the British officers included them in the list of apparent problems plaguing the village. This was part of the colonial ethos that developed in the 19th century, which deepened after a subcontinental rebellion in 1857. Colonial law proscribed what they viewed as native, vulgar, and unproductive and criminalized those engaged in such practices. The consequent Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 marked several castes for whom music and dance was a hereditary necessity as indulging in criminal activities.
A wax cylinder turning on a Thomas Edison phonograph
The sound recording industry blossomed in the Ottoman and Arab world at the turn of the twentieth century. Initially in the hands of entrepreneurs like the Blumenthal Brothers in Istanbul, British, French and German companies (like Gramophone, Pathé and Odeon) were soon to take over. Competition to sign the big stars – like Egyptian vocalist Yusuf al-Manyalawi (1847-1911) – heated up. Technology changed quickly, too. The earliest entrepreneurs had started with the wax cylinder phonograph, patented by Edison in 1887. Phonographs were a remarkable invention – portable, robust and, eventually, affordable. But the cylinders on which they recorded and played back sound were none of these things. They were hard to duplicate, fragile, and wore out quickly on repeated playing. By 1903, shellac disc recording began to take over.
Figure 1: Still from “At those terrifying frontiers,” with Palestinian hills in the background (Photo credit: N.A. Mansour)
Maybe I just have to resign myself to the fact that some Palestinian art is not made for me, a Palestinian.
When Palestinian culture is given some representation at major institutions and major publications, my instinct is to support it, even though I know diversity, equity and inclusion policies are instrumentalized as corporate tools. I try to be optimistic.
I tried to be optimistic when I heard that the Art Institute of Chicago was running Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s exhibition If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust, from July 31, 2021 until January 3, 2022. It’s one of the very few shows the Art Institute of Chicago has organized featuring contemporary artists from the Arabic-speaking world; it might even be the first, certainly the only in the last decade. The Art Institute’s permanent collection has a poor record when it comes to modern Arab artists, with only a handful representing the region, including Ghada Amer, Lalla Assia Essaydi, and Jacob El Hanani. Compare that to the dozens of Warhols perpetually on display.
Figure 1: Arabic letters in modern Kufic, 2’ x 2’, Alina Baig
To propose and teach a practice-based course in a highly academic setting is a formidable task. Practitioners usually face resistance from theoretically minded academics who perceive hands-on training as a lowbrow vocation. Last year in 2020, after practicing Islamic calligraphy for a year under a disciple of Kashif Khan (b. 1978), I decided to teach an undergraduate course on the subject at the newly established liberal arts college Habib University in Karachi, Pakistan. My home department, Social Development & Policy, rejected my proposal on the pretext that traditional art has no place in developmental studies; that it does not address pressing challenges in the way the discipline of economics does.
After initial resistance, the newly launched Comparative Humanities program[1] agreed to host the course as a creative practice requirement. Designed as an experimental course, Divine Proportions: Introduction to Islamic Calligraphy fused drawing and thinking into a singular aesthetic experience of the Islamic arts. The challenge was teaching aesthetic theory in tandem with drawing. The gap was overcome when I took the lead in teaching the historical-mythical aspects of the art. The calligrapher Ustad Kashif Khan took the responsibility of teaching calligraphy. In the first half, students discussed the readings and delivered presentations. In the second half, Ustad Kashif Khan taught them the art of drawing letters.
“Open access” is any resource you don’t have to pay for, that is available online and that has less obstacles to copying and using material – in short, anything that is available for all.1 As a movement in information sciences, it has been praised, but in our particular contexts, in mine as someone who lives in the Arabic-speaking world, I wonder about its limitations. What does “available for all” truly mean?
What open access is can be defined by cultural factors, like language, history and even the significance of computer literacy. I presented on this with N.A. Mansour at the Digital Orientalisms Twitter Conference in 2020 in both Arabic and English. But we thought a visual medium might help us provoke thought on this issue even more.
Alternative text is also available for each comic panel.
This piece is the second in our series on pedagogy, focused on themes of inclusivity and equity. The introduction to the series can be read here and other pieces in the series will be linked in the introduction as we publish them.
The Yale University Art Gallery (Photo Credit: Creative Commons)
One of my greatest mentors, the Black Muslim feminist and queer of color theorist Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, once referred to the promise of coalitional politics and communal sociality as being akin to Toni Morrison’s description of Baby Suggs preaching outdoors in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Black lesbian teacher Ms. Rain’s multicultural classroom in Push by Sapphire. I hope for an anarchist learning experience, in which the passions and thought-experiments of my students overpower the presumed hierarchies of ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ as subject-positions. When possible, I guide my students toward this collaborative, anti-hierarchical vision.
I am rebellious in, with, and against the museum world. Sometimes this manifests when I stand too close to the art, and other times it is evident when I am taking a larger group of children into the museum than I should. I tell children that their lives are worth more than the art. I belittle the rules of the museum: “we have to do this but it sucks, right?” I have a political objective aligned with principles of Black feminist thought, which is to say I encourage my students to use visual and expressive culture as a mode through which to envision a new world free from racism, sexism, queerphobia, and all other antagonistic systems. The students I teach in the museum are not expected to consider Monet’s lilies or ancient Greek sculpture beautiful. If all we discuss while looking at a Jackson Pollock drip painting is what shapes, colors, and feelings we see, I am more than satisfied.
