Being There The work of Amal Kenawy coute bien pourtant.

. Non pas mes paroles, mais le tumulte qui slve en ton corps lorsque tu tcoutes (Yet listen well. Not to my words but to the tumult that rages in your body when you listen to yourself) (Rene Daumal, Posie noire, posie blanche) Amal Kenawy (Cairo, 1974) has taught herself to speak again during the last seven years. There is no doubt about it: she has developed a language of her own with which she addresses us, a visual idiom conveyed in soft tones. Using words like butterfly, wedding dress, rat, heart, tree, bed, child, or power pylon, she creates sentences, visual fragments that are strung together by the elements: water, fire, earth, air. She repeats her words again and again with an exact cadence, not because she deliberately wants to be consistent, as people like to see in the art world, but to add force to her words. Her voice begins softly, warily, but grows in volume. Fire destroys, water purifies and washes away, air symbolises the spirit, and the earth is the field of play. She constructs a world that visualises fragments of ideas, dreams, recollections and above all the related emotions. They are as universal as they are personal, as moving as they are hard, as veiling as they are disclosing. What rise to the surface are dreams, frustrations, desires and fear. Kenawy sees herself as a filmmaker and performer, she will only hesitantly call herself an artist, and in fact it doesnt really matter. Her animations, video installations and performances have detached themselves from the disciplinary compartments. Every medium that she needs to express herself in her visual language is used. Art for me is a medium, as she says herself. It seems her work thrives best in a dramatic setting. She wanted to be a fashion designer when she enrolled at the Cinema Institute in Cairo in 1993, a course that includes historical costume. Disappointed, after two years she switched to the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Helwan University of Egypt, where she obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree. At the same time Amal began to work together with her nine-year-older brother, Abdel-Ghany Kenawy. Traces of her love of fashion can certainly still be found in that collaboration. Abdel, of whom she says that being an artist is in his blood, makes big, smooth steel sculptures. One feels that the textile elements in that work add a womans hand to the robust, cold steel, although in practice the entire work is the result of close cooperation. They are theatrical references to the body to which the materiality of the spirit is literally added. Neither this theatrical atmosphere nor her love of fashion will disappear from her work afterwards. They are used as instruments, like all the other disciplines on which she draws. Amal Kenawy plays the space, slowly takes it over, conquers it, all to seek a proof of her own presence. I might have a heart that beats and functions regularly, but cannot confirm that I am alive, she wrote in 2003 in a text to accompany her work The Room. That is still tentatively visible in her collaboration with Abdel, but her monologue expands as time passes and as

she prises herself loose from the imagery of her brother. Around 2000 she disappears from the picture for a while, but in 2002 she is suddenly back in full force with a new idiom. Although she avoids personal references in interviews, it is clear that her life has brought her new insights. Becoming a mother, marriage, and other personal experiences: a changed selfawareness. A new language does not arise just like that and a convincing voice does not come without genuine intentions. The insights are translated into personal metaphors not symbols, as has sometimes been claimed. In Frozen Memory, the last work that she made together with Abdel and with which she made her comeback, the marriage takes the stand. It is not about the wedding dress, Amal tells me, it is about the soul, the wedding dress is only symbolic, like the plastic wedding dress it represents the body inside and outside, life and death. The butterflies inside it are attracted to the light. They burn themselves with love again and again. A plastic wedding dress filled with 500 living butterflies attracted by a light around the solar plexus area takes its place on her stage. In the background a slide projector shows fragments, images, signs. The whole is a story in different dimensions. You see a man lying on his bed, but also his thoughts, his feeling, his dreams, his fears. Lines connect, links are made. The slides unfold a total picture and more and more becomes visible. The fragmentary nature of the successive slides seems to represent hesitation in the thoughts, but here is also the proof that her heart is beating. Some slides are empty. Tabula rasa? Or does the heart stand still for a moment? It is not a flowing story; a deliberate choice seems to have been made to follow the rhythm of the successive slides. There is also a second screen with a flowing image: the tree, the dress, the woman and the scorching fire first appear in a large glass box. The hard reality that connects us with one another in everyday life, and the non-material, the spiritual, represented by the butterfly. The tone is set. Kenawys The Room (video performance, 2003) put her on the international art scene. It is one of the two works that she contributed to the big retrospective of contemporary African art Africa Remix curated by Simon Njami. But it also travelled to experimental dance festivals in Europe, international film festivals (Paris, Albania and Cairo) and not surprisingly to theatre festivals. Once again Amal Kenawy set the same metaphors on the stage, but this time she put herself there too. In a video in combination with a modestly constructed stage consisting of a white-tiled room, this time she showed herself in relation to the wedding dress. There is no denying it, Kenawy addresses us about the institution of marriage from her own position. While her image was only vaguely discernible in the film Frozen Memory, now her own role is no longer denied. It is clear that she does not explicitly talk about the Muslim woman or even the Arab woman, although elements of her culture are naturally visible for those who want to see them. Her voice touches everyone, no matter what their geographical or cultural provenance may be. People jumped at associations with the work of female artists like Louise Bourgeois or Eva Hesse. Even Frida Kahlo comes to mind for a moment. Kenawy rejects it in an interview with Gerald Matt, director and curator of the Kunsthalle in Vienna. If womens art always had the same content and force of conviction, what is one supposed to say about mens art? That is part of her answer, and rightly so. Still, The Room does say something about a woman, theres no getting around it. Body and mind stand side by side, separated in the room where Kenawy herself is stitching a paper wedding dress and the spaces of the mind that the film conjures up. What remains most vividly on the retina are the hands with their

white, lace gloves. They embroider decorations on a heart that is still beating, resting on a white satin cushion. The same visual fragments recur the tree, the butterfly, the bed but the words are articulated more sharply, the lines are harder. Before she walks off at the end of the film, the paper dress is set on fire after the beating heart has been enveloped by water in the mind. The spectator can have no doubt about it: the fire of marriage is anything but purifying, the heart will not be cleansed by the tears with which it is filled The animation The Purple Artificial Forest was first presented at the Dakart Biennale in 20061. Here we can see Kenawy beginning to shift her attention to drawing, the real image no longer seems to offer enough space. The world of the dream becomes more and more dominant. She anatomises the image in the shadowy black, the colour of human flesh, and the wet, patchy purple that verges on the colour of blood. The watercolour drawings are a flowing and associative whole of alarming spatial atmospheres in which the body is dissected and fed to the space that stages it. Here I was drawing my own theatre stage, writing the play, choosing and acting the actors, playing all the roles. The next step is formulated in You will be killed (2006), which was presented together with The Purple Artificial Forest at the Singapore Biennale. The fragmented character of the slides in Frozen Memory returns, this time not through the sequence of images but through the music, which in all its greed seems to be swallowed up by its own lack of breath. The haste with which death seizes all around it, the destruction that gains supremacy, can be felt in the menacing images that succeed one another. Kenawys own image plays a central role in the work as it floats horizontally in the space of the former military hospital that was built by the British in Singapore a place she visited and where she was struck by the violence that still inhabits the space. On her personal reference in the work she says: Emotions inhabit this human frame and make a vessel of it. Like a spaceship, her head floats sideways through the space, vulnerable and strong at the same time: strong for the child to which she has given birth, vulnerable to the fears that inhabit her and the external violence. For Kenawy, the centre of this work is the power that plays a role in all relations between people and with it she once again drives the work to a safe distance. The violence that she can still feel is whispered by the old walls of the building. War is the easiest way to visualise violence, she says. The rat, the shrewd small animal, that can represent everything that is bad and dirty in this world, gnaws at people until the purple blood overshadows everything. Boobytrapped Heaven (2007) shows that Kenawy has finally broken free of her background. Her international recognition offers a new vision of herself and of where she comes from. The journey that the body undertakes is to be seen both literally and as an inner process. The new insights also offer new prospects. Our fate is traced out. Symbolically enough, we see it from the back, just as we can only interpret our destiny in retrospect. She is no longer the body in the film. It is fleshy and somehow less vulnerable. It has gained in strength although the work is mainly about fears. The work is about being naked and looking for the homeland. Just naked, covered by our own skin, in this big field of towers in an endless desert. It is a trapped place, ready to explode anytime, anywhere she explains. The stage has become the world and her voice is still growing. We can see this
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Afterwards the work travelled to the Meeting Points project in Beirut, to Cairo and recently it was seen at the Paul Klee Museum in Switzerland

in her Non-Stop Conversations (2007) for the 8th Sharjah Biennale, where the conversations seem to be predominantly with her own cultural background. The recent combinations of film, animation and performance in Cairo Eating Me (2008) and Empty Skies (August 2008) for the exhibition Emotional Drawing in the MoMak Museum in Kyoto and the MOT in Tokyo are a new step in Kenawys process of coming out. Another recent work that stands out is called Blue (video performance/installation, 2008). She built a fountain in front of an old factory in Cairo. In the background there is a video of Kenawy repeating that action over and over again in real time. In between there are subtitles as in old films containing a poem that she wrote herself, inspired after reading texts by one of the greatest Sufis of the 18th century, Galal el Deen el Romi. The constructive work on the fountain has brought her back to the sculpting she used to do with her brother, constructing. The central role of the poem, on the other hand, is to give a new dimension to her way of depicting the spiritual world. In 2007 she wrote: When I search within myself, I perceive a self that has an independent existence and that contains a set of laws which rule and govern the body as a physical entity. However, the existence of a self does not correspond to its individuality, hence my continuous attempt to define my relationship to being and to nothingness... That Amal Kenawys work is for her a process of interpreting the world and giving vent to her versatility in different forms of expression should have become obvious by now. By composing her own music, designing the lighting, the stage, choreography, photography, making installations, films, animation and even writing poetry, she makes that existence manifest. She is there, she has confirmed her voice, and it is growing. Multi-talented and producing at an extremely high rate, Amal Kenawy is currently preparing a video performance entitled Rehearsal, which will be presented at the Sydney Biennial curated by David Elliot that will open in February 2010. Life might be one big rehearsal for Amal Kenawy, but we are happy to be witnessing the process Nancy Hoffmann is an art historian, curator and director of the Instituto Buena Bista, Curacao Center for Contemporary Arts in the Dutch Caribbean.