|
Reem Hassan
and the Transformative Dynamism of Art
By Jessica
Winegar
Chicago,
December 2011
The Egyptian
revolution has shown to the world the tremendous energy and
creativity of the country's citizens. The signs, chants,
songs, and graffiti art in Tahrir Square reveal their poetic
sophistication, mastery of satire and humor, and
cosmopolitan impulse to drawn on art and media forms and
political themes from other international social movements.
Youth especially articulated their refusal of the status quo
in creative acts that swirled through the international
media.But this youth revolutionary creativity did not just
erupt out of nowhere. In the past fifteen years, young
Egyptian artists have created their own vibrant artistic
movement that has gone on to receive the attention of the
international art world. This blossoming of the art scene at
the hands of young artists is part and parcel of the major
social transformation that we are currently witnessing in
Egypt. Artists have radically rethought artistic practice
and the role and shape of artistic institutions. They have
sought to create new kinds of bridges to their colleagues in
other countries. Committed to the local context, they are
nonetheless cosmopolitan in their orientation. Drawing on
earlier moments of cosmopolitanism in Egyptian art, they
have sought to create works that are simultaneously moored
in personal, contextual experience but that think beyond
national boundaries. This attempt to define and improve the
present through international connection is shared with
their fellow revolutionaries in the public squares of Egypt,
with whom they regularly protest.
Reem Hassan
is a key figure in this transformation of the art scene in
Egypt. Based in Alexandria, at a remove from the powerful
state art institutions in Cairo, she has been at the
vanguard of creating an alternative vision for artistic
practice in the country. She was central to the experimental
art workshops of Farouk Wahba, a renegade art professor who
in the early 1990s founded an alternative to the state art
schools. Reem and her colleagues advocated a departure from
the overly formalist and technical training of these
schools, and created an innovative model of shared dialogue
and critique as they did their work together. At this time,
Reem emerged as a leader of the youth art movement, both
with her art and her activities in building new avenues for
art production and reception. |
For example,
she became one of the founders of performance art in the
country in a piece that rocked the local art world for the
way it challenged audience sensibilities as well as gender
and generational hierarchies.
Reem is most
well-known for her abstract paintings. Unlike the work of
most of her predecessors, these paintings refuse overtly
nationalist and/or literal readings and as such constitute
an important intervention into modern painting in Egypt. But
well beyond that, they draw on the languages of
international abstract art to push the relationship between
line, form, and color. Organic lines, of varying density and
width but hardly ever straight, cut up chunks of canvas that
are then saturated with colors from a palette that veers on
garishness. This is the compelling element of Reem's work --
the tension between the delicate organicity of the lines and
forms and the glaring, in-your-face nature of the color
saturation. A dynamism thus emerges not solely from the
placement of clear brushstrokes of line, but also from the
way the color draws the viewer in, because it sidelines many
of the typical color choices in the famous historical
examples of painterly abstraction. This is especially the
case in the paintings with large blocks of white, blocks
which emphasize the organic nature of the forms and tease
the viewer to find representations which are, in the end,
untenable.
The dynamism
in Reem's art is matched by her continued activity building
the art movement in Egypt and, especially, its international
connections. As a new professor at the arts college, she is
instrumental in revamping higher art education. She is a
leader in rebuilding venerable art institutions, such as the
Alexandria Atelier which had fallen into a bit of
obsolescence in the past decades. She also co-founded Dwayer,
a new organization dedicated to dialogue through the arts.
In the same vein, she regularly connects emerging artists to
institutions and artists from abroad, encouraging forms of
dialogue and connected artistic practice that extends the
early work in Wahba's studio into international circuits.
The work that Reem began in the 1990s to revolutionize the
art scene in Egypt will no doubt meet new opportunities,
challenges, and horizons in the new era on which Egypt is
embarking. This is an artist to watch. |
