Susan Hefuna

Susan Hefuna
xcultural codes
Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2004
ISBN 3-936 636-15-X

Hans Gercke

Window Pictures
Thoughts about the Works of Susan Hefuna

The traditional European panel painting, conceived according to the rules of the linear perspective, is a window to another world, at least partly different to the one in which we live. The illusion that we can enter into it is very convincing, even though we know that this is not possible. Our familiar and formative principles of art developed in the Renaissance, which never existed in similar form in non-European cultures, draws its attractiveness from this uninterrupted to this day. We imagine a picture of a world which we believe could be within our grasp even though it is foreign. ...

Susan Hefuna
xcultural codes
Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2004
ISBN 3-936 636-15-x

______________
Hans Gercke

Window Pictures
Thoughts about the Works of Susan Hefuna

The traditional European panel painting, conceived according to the rules of the linear perspective, is a window to another world, at least partly different to the one in which we live. The illusion that we can enter into it is very convincing, even though we know that this is not possible. Our familiar and formative principles of art developed in the Renaissance, which never existed in similar form in non-European cultures, draws its attractiveness from this uninterrupted to this day. We imagine a picture of a world which we believe could be within our grasp even though it is foreign.
There are other principles of art, even within the European tradition. The sacred wall paintings of the Middle Ages are like projections of a world to which we have no access and to which access does not appear possible. Another reality becomes apparent at the boundary of our comprehensible reality. This boundary itself becomes transparent in the glass windows of Gothic cathedrals. From the outside, another world illuminates the interior, located beyond the visible outer world – at night, light from the cult room radiates to the outside.
In the 20th century, another outlook took shape in addition to the window picture. The picture loses its illusionary character, it materializes as an object. It therefore gains tangible qualities, shares its existence with other objects in the room and seems only stranger and more confusing by this community. It loses its frame – at the same time as sculpture is removed from its pedestal. Instead of the frame that sets off and determines the position, we find context, the function of which can be dialectic. The artwork stands in confusing contrast to its surroundings, or perhaps it is the other way around, a familiar object becomes a work of art simply by a change of context, as Marcel Duchamp demonstrated.
Encounter and confrontation with strangers, which can serve as a paradigm for our attitude toward artwork, is related to the function of frame and surrounding, to the ambivalence of a window that can be opened and closed, that allows us to peer out but perhaps not in when closed, that lives from the osmotic ambivalence of openness and restriction. It is tempting at this point to go into the variations of window themes in art and their highly diverse implications – one thinks of the pictures of Vermeer and Menzel, of Caspar David Friedrich and Oskar Schlemmer, to name just a few examples. In the glass windows of Johannes Schreiter, taught nets tear at the seam between the inside to outside before the opening – it is uncertain if this a break-in from the outside or a break-out from the inside, if it is the loss of security or the gain of freedom.
Within this context, we are reminded of an essential aspect of the architecture from the last two centuries, the – partial – elimination of the separation between the outside and inside that is so impressively manifested in the construction of such features as passages and winter gardens, greenhouses and crystal palaces. In current architecture, glass plays a dominant albeit chameleon-like role. Glass, that solid liquid , can be transparent and hermetic, permitting a view out and denying a view in, reflecting the mirror image of the viewer back upon himself.
The window as the seam between the inside and outside, between this world and eternity. The window as a symbol of ambivalence, of delimitation and opening. For her dialogue with two rather different cultures, in both of which she is equally at home , Susan Hefuna, the Egyptian-German artist, has found a convincing metaphor in the lattices of the mashrabiyas. These wood carvings, an integral part of Egyptian architecture, which have stone and textile counterparts no less precious in Islamic art, permit a view to the outside but deny a view to the inside – in similar manner to the artistically open veils which still cloak the faces of the women in some Arabian countries today. Susan Hefuna has varied this topic in various ways in impressive works of Indian ink on paper, in objects and installations, without admittedly reducing her range of artist possibilities to this one motif.
Nevertheless, in Hefuna’s work, as other contributions in this book explain in greater detail, it represents a dialogue with a very contemporary and controversial topic. World politics today revolves around this question: Will globalisation lead to a general levelling of the playing field under the command of a missionary veiled, western-capitalistic, neo-colonialism or to a war of cultures , which may have already begun? Or are there still ways to openness and global cooperation without having to give up our respective cultural identities, or what is left of them? As is well known, strangeness and differences can spark fear and aggression, but they can also be a motivating starting point for intensive debate that must not necessarily conclude in agreement. A dialog between identical partners is senseless – every discussion thrives on the tension between similarity and difference, agreement and contradiction.
Art can serve as a model, a seismograph for development and sensibility. Hefuna, unquestionably cosmopolitan due to her two homelands and travels to many continents, deals with globally relevant topics. Her works are being recognized more and more around the world. However, precisely due to this concreteness with which the questions here are posed, one should not fail to see the other dimensions resonating beyond the political in the works derived from the mashrabiyas. The dialectic of the window motif operates with poetic balance of light and dark, light and heavy, density, strength and tenderness, order and its subjective relativity, patterns and individuality. This is how associations arise, the junctions of which are just as important as the interstices that first make them possible.
Hefuna’s works deal with communication and isolation, discrimination and relationship, debate and rejection. There are tones of architecture and organic-vegetable, some of her sheets remind one of musical scores, texts, palimpsests. Even in her performances, videos and photographs, Susan Hefuna works with opposites and transitions, with sequences, layerings and penetrations –both very concrete and in the abstract sense. Formally, her works always have a substantial dimension, a timely and yet timeless validity. Susan Hefuna’s art, at the seam between two cultures, both foreign and familiar, is political and private, precise and open at the same time.

I am pleased that the Heidelberg art society is the first station to show Susan Hefuna’s exhibit, xcultural codes. Similar to the artist herself who is always underway between different places and cultures, her exhibition will travel in 2004/2005: from Heidelberg to the Stadtgalerie in Saarbrücken, from there to the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool, then to the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, and finally back to the Galerie der Stadt in Backnang. On behalf of all these exhibitors, we would like to thank all those who have been so dedicated in their contributions to the xcultural codes project. Special thanks goes the authors who approached Susan Hefuna’s work from so many different points of view, the translators as well as the Kehrer publishing house in Heidelberg, who brought everything together in the form of this book with such understanding.
Heidelberg, October 2003
Hans Gercke

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Rose Issa in conversation with Susan Hefuna

R.I.: You have chosen to start this exhibition with your black-and-white drawings and not with the complex, conceptual, multi-media works using digital camera that started your career in 1989. Could you elaborate on your background, how this drawing series developed, and how you reached the austerity of these apparently simple lines?

S.H.: Though I was born to a Catholic German mother and a Muslim Egyptian father, I grew up as a child in Egypt and only moved back to Germany when I was six for my education. I studied fine arts in German art academies and completed my postgraduate degree in new media in Frankfurt.
I was always attracted to the abstract form of structures - that of molecules, DNA or modules -, those details in science and biology that illuminate us about the bigger structure of life. I see similarities between my drawings, which are inspired by the shape of the mashrabiya (the old latticed wooden or stone decorative screens associated with architecture) that you see in old Cairo, and the molecular structure, especially in the joins where the lines cross each other.
In 1994, when I started to make these drawings, hidden connections and similarities between these unconscious structures became apparent. I saw them as a crossroads, an intermediate phase for connecting my ideas. Their realisation signified a visual impact and my previous structural attractions achieving a material form. In 1988 my work centred around video, drawings, and multimedia installations that became more and more sophisticated and mechanically perfect (perfect execution is expected in the West). When in 1992 I exhibited my first solo show in Egypt - a high-tech multimedia installation - one of my digital photographs of a mashrabiya screen was instantly perceived as a familiar object by the Egyptian public. Until then, all western audiences associated it purely with abstract art within the western concept. This first-hand and unexpected feedback from Egypt was a complete surprise to me. A different audience saw the essence of the work and not its reflection, without having read any of my intentions or knowing anything about my background.
From then on, my work was somehow enriched by this dual feedback: the historical, scientific, and aesthetic context of the work perceived by a western eye, and the references that were immediately related to familiar surroundings by Egyptians. The reading of the work hence depended on the codes of each culture, the same form referring to other ideas and images from the past and present. I learned that there is not one truth, but layers of interpretations or perceptions.
In terms of the actual drawing, the size of the paper is important, for I always draw my lines in one go, without interruption or re-inking. Their size is naturally related to my body s capacity to hold a line for so far and so long. The drawings started as two-dimensional, but developed into layers of paper of different thickness and translucence, so the texture was that of the superimposed layers of drawings, almost three-dimensional now, which I could see floating before me.

R.I.: You came back to photography in 1999, but instead of using modern digital cameras, you chose to work with pinhole cameras and old materials, photographing the old mashrabiyas of Cairo once again. Then you gradually moved from the details of latticed screens to landscapes. How did the transition take place, and what links the details of decorative objects often associated with urban life to the open-air landscapes that you photograph?

S.H.: Unconsciously, the structure of the mashrabiya is linked to my city life in Cairo and Germany. I started to use the pinhole camera in 1999, not only as a reaction to the increasingly high-tech demands and pressures of western productions, but also to explore and play with the old clichés of exoticism. It was an exercise in self-exorcism and also a deliberate attempt to include more imperfection, accidents, and mistakes, as in real life. Photographing palm trees in the delta, where my father comes from and where I spent most of my childhood and later my summer holidays with my family and late
brother, was an ideal setting for exploring my own visual memories. Yet these same familiar images would speak to my other side as exotic imagery. The palm trees in our family cemetery and my childhood playgrounds may look old-fashioned and ordinary, banal to other Egyptians and simply exotic and ancient to westerners, yet these places are highly charged with personal and emotional memories. Even when I sometimes put myself in front of the camera, few western eyes could
detect the incongruity of my presence in such surroundings. For although part of me belonged and still belongs to this village life, I was never an integral part of its culture, of this very familiar landscape. Evidently I remain an outsider to my father s countrymen, just as I am an outsider to westerners, a native in a picture, my hair and eyes confirming my foreignness. In both cases I remain a foreigner in a foreign land, in both countries, despite my dual belonging.

R.I.: This same landscape is present in your most recent work, where you hid your digital video camera on the roof of your family home. This two-hour film, in real time and place, and shot in one go like your drawings, is like a piece of theatre about real life at a village crossroads. In theory, your camera s observation is one that women behind a mashrabiya could make. What was your intention in using your camera like that?

S.H.: I go to Egypt two or three times a year. This time, I went with the intention of filming this specific spot in my father s village, which could be filmed from the roof of our family house, with a hidden camera, so that I could capture life as I saw it year after year, and as it has been lived for centuries. The particular spot is a crossroads of canals that provide water to surrounding fields, feeding the neighbouring farms and animals. This particular crossroads is quite busy with people, who exchange gossip on their way to work while bringing or taking their animals to the fields. There is also a timeless quality about this spot, where apparently nothing happens, and where time stands still. Egypt is full of such timeless images and activity, as if eternity is part of the present, with life repeating itself. This romantic image of life in the delta, which seems innocent and pure, hides many stories, invisible from behind the screens.
Although these images are taken with a digital camera, they still reflect an exotic , old-fashioned imagery, because the landscape has not changed much, nor the activity. The only alien image is that of myself, mingling with the locals; an outsider who is in reality part of the scenery, for I am recognised as a member of this village, even though in exile. Evidently I am an outsider in both my cultures, but nothing conveys this more poignantly than my own photographs or film. This feeling of being in exile, constantly observing, wherever I live and belong, is what permeates my work.

London, August 2002

______________
Berthold Schmitt

Life in the Delta 1423/2002
A film by Susan Hefuna

The classic Nile journey begins or ends in Cairo. In addition to the visit of the capital, archeological sites such as Giza, Memphis, Thebes, Luxor and Aswan are popular stations of the journey. Along the river banks the panorama of tourist expectations unfolds upon the mysterious country: pyramids, graves and temples symbolize the millennia old culture while palms, desert, and picturesque shapes represent the foreignness of the landscape and life on the majestic river.

The Nile Delta, opening north of Cairo and extending to the Mediterranean, has little in common with the romantic 19th century notions of the Orient, mysticism and exoticism. The enormous delta area divides into a complex network of main and side branches flowing from and into each other as well as a wide network of settlements and highways. The picturesque vision of the river’s sublimity and fertility ends at this transition to the sea, a river that has become a unique symbol for one of the most important cultures of mankind. The life of the people in the delta is not on the schedule of the classic journey through the country of the Pharaohs.

Life in the Delta 1423/2002 is the title of a film by the German-Egyptian artist, Susan Hefuna. A hidden camera installed on the roof of her parental home in a village in the Nile Delta recorded events on the street in front of the house – two hours without panning of the camera. The center of the picture, empty at first, is framed by one and two-storied residential buildings, walls, gates, stairs, gardens and trees. Only the permanent rattle of an engine and the chirping of birds can be heard on the deserted stage of the village intersection. But an active hustle and bustle soon animates the scene: pedestrians cross the street, an old man steps in front of the door to his house, children and women enter the scene. Cattle are transported on a pickup, horses and donkey carts quietly roll by, bicycles and motorcycles whirl up dust. Two men converse, a girl pushes a boy aside, a small child cries. Geese flutter in and waddle up and down the street. Workers arrive, open a manhole cover in the middle of the intersection and start working in the opening. Passers-by watch the workers, comment about the activity, one of the workers teases a young woman. Other passers-by hardly notice the work, continue on their way unflustered or steer their vehicle serenely around the construction site. The scene has the atmosphere of everyday life in the province. The people go about their business, play, shop, attend to their work, while away the time; they meet, dawdle, speak to each other or avoid one another.

Life in the Delta 1423/2002 is a metaphor about the conditions of our perception and the limits of our intercourse with strangers. The pictures and sounds give the impression that the observer can quickly become familiar with the unknown situation. Besides possible experiences from one’s own journeys to Egypt, general knowledge of pictures transmitted by the media, films and reports on the country and its people offer an important guide, demonstratively employed and required by Susan Hefuna.
Like set pieces, the traditional costumes, building forms and plants point to the Arabian culture and way of life. The pictures soon raise questions, however. Who are the depicted persons? Where do they come from and where are they going? Do they have relationships?

The artist does not comment or interpret the recording. There is no directing to coordinate the people or their actions, no self-explanatory plot. On the contrary. Man and animal appear in time and space without comprehensible pattern, stay a while and leave the field of vision again. Even when the same figure appears more than once, there is no explanatory structure to give the observer a clear and meaningful idea about him. The intersection is a place where people, animals and vehicles come together from different directions in unpredictable rhythm, confront each other in changing constellations and depart from one another. Although these are phenomena assumingly familiar to each viewer since identical or similar events take place everywhere in the world, the specific place remains rural Egypt and the events there have an ambivalent relationship between proximity and distance, between familiarity and strangeness.

Showing the residents of the quarter in their daily environment suggests intimacy and proximity at first glance. The people move and behave quite freely, they do not act according to the instructions of a director or for the sake of a spectator. Susan Hefuna actually moves occurring events to the distance using compositional hurdles. The edge of a roof, the foliage of trees and the courtyard wall in the lower picture form a visual barrier between the location of the observer and the happenings in the street. This distance prevents focused observation of the figures appearing so that only general behavior and movements can be seen. Furthermore, the camera in its the fixed position cannot follow the path of individuals and thereby bring the life of the people in the Life in the Delta closer to the observer in a narrative way.
The background story of the film is another barrier to visualizing the limits to approaching the foreignness. The opening sequence shows Susan Hefuna on the train journey to her home town, the closing scene shows her on departure. An unmistakable indication that we the viewers are not on-site in Egypt and living through a genuine experience; a mediator, the artist, stands in between and acts as an ambassador. As if to prove this, Susan Hefuna also appears in the main part of the film. Crossing the street she talks to a western-dressed resident, her hair open and wrapped in a traditional costume. The artist contributes to the two cultures and connects one with the other through her person. The ambivalent attitude between proximity and distance shows that Hefuna is not concerned with penetrating and intermixing Arabian and western features. By revealing the borders between here and there, the cultural difference between homeland and foreign land, the artist emphasizes the uniqueness of the other and at the same time preserves it.

The structural form of Life in the Delta 1423/2002 is tied to Hefuna’s drawings and photos inspired by the mashrabiyas of Islamic architecture. In the video, Susan Hefuna allows the western observer only a screened view of a foreign culture. In doing so, Hefuna removes the people in the pictures from the condescending and kitschy portrayal by the globally operating media apparatus. Analogous to the function and esthetics of a mashrabiya, the structure of the film, appearing at first glance simple but then revealing itself as multi-layered, is simultaneously a passage and obstruction. In Life in the Delta 1423/2002, the activity in the street in front of Susan Hefuna’s parental home in the Nile Delta is a metaphor worthy of the stage and a challenge to observe the nature of foreign cultures more attentively, and at the same time maintain a dignified distance.

______________
Bryan Biggs

A Question of Disorientation

Susan Hefuna spent time in 2001 in residence at Delfina Studios in London, a year in which she also exhibited in the capital. xcultural codes however provides the first opportunity for audiences in the UK to see a substantial selection of work by this artist who seems to be constantly on the move. Indeed the idea of exactly where home is and the contingent nature of art, its capacity to acquire different readings as it travels to and engages with new contexts, are pertinent to a discussion about Hefuna’s work. The exhibition title she has chosen acknowledges the complexity of codes that comes into play in her work as different audiences – be they in Cairo, Heidelberg, Cape Town, Liverpool or Boulder, Colorado – register recognition with particular symbols or elements, codes that Hefuna delights in mixing up, not to confound the viewer, but to open up possibilities for new associations and interpretations. In this way she challenges assumptions about specific cultural meanings, creating art that denies easy categorisation and eludes fixed readings informed by art world, political or other interests.

Everlyn Nicodemus, speaking of her own experience as an African artist and writer resident in Europe, has argued that cultural identity is but another dependency from which the artist must escape (1). In the UK in particular, artists have been quick to both use and subvert the official agendas of multiculturalism, whose well-meaning creation of new, inclusive categories of cultural diversity has so far failed to fully reflect or take into account the complex and shifting contemporary realities of an increasing number of people, especially in urban centres, whose experience is one of hybridity, of cultural confluence and interchange. Hefuna’s own experience in London, showing her work and talking about it – albeit to an informed audience of her peers – has already suggested to her an empathy, a familiarity almost, with her art practice that is quite different from its reception in Germany. Born in 1962 into a mixed Muslim/Christian family, her father Egyptian, her mother German, Hefuna’s dual heritage sits somewhat uncomfortably within the dominant concept of German citizenship, in which a narrow biological definition of nationhood seems impervious to broader cultural claims. Her work reflects this duality and the sense of distance she feels both from Egypt where she grew up, and – significantly – from Germany, where she has spent much of her life and where she is based. Leslie A. Adelson, in discussing Turkish authors in Germany, critiques the notion of betweenness , a bridge between two worlds where critics invariably position these authors in the nation’s cultural landscape, and a place that functions literally like a reservation designed to contain, restrain and impede new knowledge, not enable it (2). By comparison, the UK’s history and acceptance of home grown artists from a diversity of cultural backgrounds, combined with a critical context informed by an expansion of postcolonial cultural studies, promises a markedly different response to Hefuna’s exhibition when it travels here, creating perhaps new sets of codes to add to the interpretative mix.

Whilst the experience of diaspora is one that is increasingly coming to signify, somewhat paradoxically, the idea of home at the start of the 21st century, Hefuna resists being pigeonholed as a diasporic artist: I think it is just normal that people are moving, moving all the time and mixing up. I am always on the move in the UK and US, in Europe, in Egypt. So my identity is a mixture of influences, which come from all over. I do not consider myself as anything . Hefuna’s interest then lies in transcending labels, and in creating an art that is spiritual, timeless, open-ended, one that overcomes boundaries, categorisation and clichés. To achieve this however she starts by visiting the very point from which those clichés emanate, interrogating codes and symbols already heavily invested with specific cultural associations, using images redolent of a time and a landscape scrutinised through an Imperial gaze. This is seen most clearly in her photographic series, which conjure up a distant world of colonial Egypt, scenes of everyday ordinariness made exotic by the presence of palm trees, a lone donkey tethered in the midday sun, or an intriguing doorway into some forbidden place. Elsewhere, Hefuna’s intricately patterned drawings suggest decoration from Middle Eastern or North African architecture, and her sculptural objects seem arcane, redolent of Arabic antiquity. In these ways she constructs a fictive space, whose inauthenticity is never far beneath the surface. Yet unlike cliché, in which meaning becomes devalued, reduced to perfect simplicity, this space is layered, ambiguous, open to multiple readings.

One could approach the same work in purely formal and aesthetic terms, from the same European modernist perspective that Hefuna’s fine art training in Germany has equipped her with. In such a reading the chance effects and degraded quality that the primitive pinhole camera brings to the photos reflect a truth to materials , there is no attempt to conceal the imperfections of the productive process; the grid drawings are exercises in geometric abstraction; the three dimensional works exist only as sculptural forms. This interpretation alone, however, ignores the cultural referents in Hefuna’s work, the significance of the mashrabiya for example, with its position between private and public space, its metaphorical associations with veiling and voyeurism. Another artist who uses the motif of the mashrabiya, Samta Benyahia, questions through her work whether it is possible to see the world without the screen of social and critical assumptions (3). Hefuna shares this concern, finding in the mashrabiya’s ability to operate in two directions the possibility for dialogue rather than closure, a template she uses for drawing in and engaging with her audience.

This is demonstrated in her photographic work, where there is an intangibility about the images that prompts questions from us rather than provides any immediate answers. These are photographs to ponder on, inviting the viewer to speculate on their production as much as on their content. Images of Cairo today appear grainy and rudimentary, as if pictured at the birth of photography itself. Cityscapes are inexplicably printed in negative, whilst others taken of architectural detail on the streets of Cairo resemble the early darkroom experiments of Man Ray. Is it necessary for us to know the identity of the people captured going about their business in the Nile delta, or others deliberately posed for the camera, including a woman who sits alone and slightly tense, who turns out in fact to be the artist herself? We respond to the seemingly provisional status of these images with our own hesitancy. If we cannot quite grasp them, there is nonetheless an acknowledgement that, just as the artist has allowed a degree of uncertainty and ambiguity, in order to unravel the works’ coded layers we too must remain open in our approach. Nothing is as simple as it seems. Included in a set of picture postcards that Hefuna has produced, similar to the ones that tourists send as greetings from Cairo, is one in which she sits in the lap of a sphinx statue, her serene inscrutability and arms outstretched in front of her mimicking the pose of her mythological host, as she watches the river flow. It is only on closer inspection that we realise it is the Thames she observes and the location is London’s Embankment, whose Cleopatra’s Needle obelisk is just out of shot. Hefuna’s impromptu intervention here is a small act of cultural reclamation, a simple yet effective gesture that de-codes the monument’s symbolic presence right at the historical heart of the Empire. The effect, as elsewhere in her work, is one of disorientation – literally, in the sense of Orientalism’s centuries-long indexing of the land to the east and south of the Mediterranean – as Hefuna steers us away from the certain paths that the West’s hegemonic compass has mapped out for the region.

The debt that European modernism, stretching back to Picasso and Matisse, owes to visual expressions from outside Europe has been well documented, if not fully embraced in official art histories. Islamic art in particular had a profound influence on artists in the West, demonstrating that the world could be pictured non-figuratively, and that patterning – up till then consigned to the category of mere decoration – offered possibilities for formal innovation (and indeed spiritual and philosophical signification). The coexistence in Hefuna’s practice of visual codes from both Islamic and Western conventions continues to interrogate this relationship, setting up an intriguing interplay. The apparent simplicity of the lattice motifs in her drawings, for example, with their reference to the mashrabiya screen, belies the complexity of these graphic works. Gradually we notice flaws in the patterning, an irregularity to the lines, some of which discontinue and veer off course, and there is an imprecision to the joints. Far from either the rigorous mathematical order of classical Arabic pattern or the strict obsession of contemporary American artist Sol Lewitt’s grid drawings, Hefuna’s draughtsmanship is intuitive, serving to loosen structural rigidity. Indeed this fluidity of line creates an impression of netting in these intimate works, rather than the solidity of the mashrabiya, which can – as Hefuna demonstrates in another series of digitally manipulated photographs – be dissolved through the effects of light and movement. Like net curtains, associated in an English context with the nosey neighbour forever lurking at the front room window, keeping an eye on the comings and goings of the street, these lattices obscure what is behind them, sometimes a density of further patterned layers or else an indistinctly shaped shadow. We peer in but are we too being observed?

The recent announcement of the decision to award Liverpool European Capital of Culture in 2008 has stimulated debates in the city around the three complex and highly contested concepts referred to in this designation: What is Europe and what is it to be a European? What are the implications for Liverpool, a city for so long on the economic margins of Europe, of occupying a position, even if only nominally, at the centre? What is culture, and who controls the cultural agenda? Similar questions, posed on a bigger scale in relation to nationhood, identity and independence, and given sharper focus in the broader context of globalisation’s onward march, are increasingly being voiced around the world. They are expressed in the struggle for self-determination by nations, communities and individuals. Artists – at least those who, like Hefuna, enter into a critical relationship with the world – see, not the hopelessness, but the possibilities within this condition. Her art has the capacity to engage positively with the new social realities of dislocation, rather than speaking of loss and longing.

Notes

1 Everlyn Nicodemus, ‘From Independence to Independence’, in Independent Practices (Liverpool: Bluecoat Arts Centre, Centre for Art International Research/Liverpool School of Art & Design, 2000).

2 Leslie A. Adelson, ‘Against Between: A Manifesto’, in Unpacking Europe (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, NAi Publishers, 2001).

3 David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros, introduction to Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art (London: Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), Modern Art Oxford, 2003).

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Negar Azimi

A deception of sorts

Egypt has long occupied a unique place in the collective consciousness, its history replete with sights and tales that have lent the country a near iconic status in global mythologies. Artist Susan Hefuna contests the fixed nature of identity that has informed representations of Egypt both from the external world and, importantly, from within. Doubtless, it is Hefuna’s dual heritage as the child of an Egyptian father and a German mother that has afforded her the luxury of an alternative view; with childhoods split between the rural Nile Delta and alternately, Germany, Hefuna is both outsider and insider at once.

While spending summers in the Delta as a child, Hefuna felt at times like a visitor among her Egyptian family and peers. Her grandfather, an imposing patriarchal figure, allowed Susan to join him at his table, a position that no other female member of the family would ever dare occupy. From the beginning, she knew she was regarded as different from the rest of the grandchildren. In her grandfather’s home, perched high atop the family’s formal sitting room was a studio portrait of Susan, her father and brother, in classic hand-colored glory, housed in a deep frame - perhaps an apt manifestation of the rigid, constructed nature of Susan’s identity in the village.

Nevertheless, friends at school in Germany could not grasp the vivid rural scenes she recreated with her pencils and paints, born of memories of Egypt. Later, when an American woman offered to paint nine year-old Susan’s portrait, the result - an unfaithful rendering that left an olive-skinned Susan looking more like an idyllic vision of a European child - only served to confuse her. It seemed that nobody was able to situate her.

In the 90s, after having completed art studies in Germany, Hefuna rediscovered Egypt. Though her work was not explicitly dealing with issues stemming from her Egyptian heritage, she was exhibiting in Egypt long before it was desirable or correct in the anthropological sense, having shows at the Ministry of Culture’s Akhenaton Center, the Cairo International Biennale, as well as the Townhouse Gallery of contemporary art.

Working at the time with views of microscopic structures, she soon discovered that these abstract structures were not far removed from the intricate grids of the traditional window screen of the mashrabiya, a functional ornament that marks Islamic art and architecture in the region. It was as if Hefuna had been searching for that very pattern through the language of her work and, here in Egypt, she had finally found it in organic fashion - as it had existed unchanged for centuries.

Countless have pondered the mashrabiya as an architectural and socio-cultural relic. Traditionally associated with prevailing Orientalist images of the region - harems, odalisque and the likes, the mashrabiya has come to be a symbol of an imagined subordination of the female in the Middle East, for hidden behind its opaque lattice, a woman was to stay clear of the exterior world, sequestered in an ambiguous prison. In this largely standard reading, seclusion equals exclusion.

But the imposing nature of the mashrabiya belies its multiple meanings, for within those very grids is a degree of nuance that lies at the very heart of Hefuna’s work. While the person lying behind the mashrabiya’s screen is not permitted to interact with the outside world, it affords her respite from the heat of the exterior, as well as a sanctuary from that same world’s ugliness. She sees without being seen, arguably occupying a position of privilege, of knowing.

Perhaps like the mashrabiya, Hefuna offers that identity is also nuanced, that representation is a tricky thing and that appearances may be deceiving. In the context of Egypt, it is photography in particular that has been the medium of choice in representations of the country and its populace. Long one of the most photographed locations on earth, Egypt’s stature in photographic history is a significant one. Nevertheless, little of the early body of visual documentation of the country was born at the hands of an Egyptian Gaze, for its experience has historically been shaped by the use of the camera as a fetishizing tool of the Occident. The advent of photographic technology in the 19th century, with its potential to frame reality, shape history and define the sphere of the inclusive, and perhaps more importantly, the exclusive, bestowed significant power upon its early foreign bearers.

Today, there are a significant number of photographers in Egypt, if not a majority, who remain true to the legacy of their largely European forbearers, arguably compromising self-expression and opting to capture desert scenes, pharaonic imagery or other pieces of Egypt’s exalted history in popularized representations of the country.

It is given such a context that Hefuna’s first photographic works in Egypt were particularly jarring. Employing an antiquated pinhole camera, perhaps the most low-tech of image-capturing devices, Hefuna captured scenes from the Delta that were anything but picturesque, showing them in 2000 at Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery. Out of focus, laden with dirt and dust and often taken in seemingly surreptitious fashion, these were the original un-postcards.

And then there was Cairo. It was only later in her life, in fact as an adult, that Hefuna discovered the frenetic capital, for when the family would travel to Egypt during her childhood, a ferry would take them from Venice to Alexandria, and from there directly to the village - bypassing the sprawling metropolis completely. With her pinhole camera, Susan eventually prepared self-portraits in Cairo, showing a series of them at the Townhouse Gallery in 2001 in the context of an exhibition entitled 4 Women – 4 Views. Here Susan presented herself frozen, a modern-day Nefertiti, on a chair within the mashrabiya-laden walls of Cairo’s Gayer-Anderson Museum. Appearing ill at ease, even uncomfortable, Hefuna’s pose transmitted a sense of not belonging - neither here nor there. Her being situated within the bounds of a museum - importantly a wholly European institution - left her eerily reminiscent of an object to be examined, perhaps in the tradition of the models that characterized early staged images of the region. The ethnographic aura of the space and the constructions within were emphasized by the presentation of the photo-series in fastidiously assembled frames that resembled a natural history collection.

While taking part in a residency in London in 2001, Hefuna’s notion of the un-postcard materialized as she printed her images of Cairo and formatted them in an identical manner as the trademark Lehnert and Landrock postcards of the last century. And as with the Swiss-German duo’s works, these postcards were made in Cairo, printed in Germany. A related series was produced on the occasion of the DisORIENTation exhibition at the House of World Cultures in Berlin in 2003, marked by a large-scale billboard of Nefertiti, a figure straight from Egypt’s story-book past. Again, inscribed upon the billboard is a sort of disclaimer, an uncanny reminder that every culture brings their own particular set of codes to the table in the construction of a place: Greetings from Cairo - printed in Berlin.

In 2001, Hefuna again challenged popular representations of Egypt, this time those of the capital in particular with an installation piece produced for the Al-Nitaq downtown arts festival. With central Talaat Harb Square as her backdrop, Hefuna created a vision of Egypt that defied standard images hitherto presented. Using simple banner material, the variety that is often draped in ubiquitous fashion in Cairo’s side streets - covered with political slogans or even used for film announcements and advertising purposes - Hefuna printed large-scale images, again taken with the archaic pinhole camera. But these images were far from the romantic scenes that Lehnert and Landrock depicted, or even the stylized images of pyramids and Red Sea beaches that mark contemporary postcards. Here were unspectacular village scenes - an unframed shot of a cemetery, shots of livestock wading at the bank of the Nile. The pinhole camera, a long-retired remnant of photographic history, lent a fictional historicity to the images, a false sense that these were exotic artifacts.

A closer look, however, revealed that these artifacts were mediocre at best, hardly reflecting the visions of Egypt one would hope to see draped upon a thoroughfare whose namesake, Talaat Harb, was a cinema mogul during Cairo’s belle époque. In the end, Talaat Harb was a symbol of the cosmopolitan Cairo that was once more in line with Paris than the practically anonymous Delta town of Hefuna’s youth, a town that one could hardly locate on a map. The fact that the banners were draped above a Khedieval building housing Groppi’s café, a staple European institution often used as a backdrop in Egyptian films, only emphasized that particular exalted vision of Cairo.

The resulting contrast created by the hyper-public installation of the banners was a striking one, as it was as if Hefuna were advertising a film that nobody would ever want to see, a film that in fact did not exist. And within this particular film, with the final banner, she inserted herself, stoic as usual and, again, within the bounds of the mashrabia, solemn – implicated, a central actor in exposing the very essence of a façade.

In Life in the Delta (2002), Hefuna uses video as a medium in representing an ostensibly banal period of time in her family’s village. Both voyeuristic and harmless in its appropriation of a view from a roof above this dusty intersection, her access here underlines her position as both an outsider and insider. Its subtitle, 1423/2002, emphasizes the relative stasis at which life in a Delta village has remained, at times immune to the forces of time and modernity. Nevertheless, a closer look reveals that this particular undramatic undocumentation shot in real time is dramatic in of itself, as a problem with the local sewer pipe elicits varying degrees of alarm amidst the village’s residents over the course of nearly two hours of footage.

And what of video? Importantly, Egypt, as the historic epicenter of the Arab film industry, has long had a visual monopoly on the moving image. Cairo during the Second World War was not far removed from any other cosmopolitan city of that era, while Egyptians had their own film glitterati that matched Hollywood or Bombay’s in its pervasiveness and self-containment. The natural by-product of a rich film heritage has been a collective obsession with the compact home-version of the cinema, via the televised image. Indeed, the television has attained cultural artifact status as an entertainment and information medium, while in Egypt, it is characterised by its own trademark, largely soap-operatic codes.

In a country in which the televised, from the Ramadan serial to standard soap operas dominate visual culture, the scene of a life in the day of the Delta exists as the virtual antithesis of everything that is associated with the moving image - the gloss, the glamour and the drama that Egyptians are accustomed to in prevailing self-representations. Again, with Life in the Delta, Hefuna has engaged in a deception of sorts.

In the meantime, Hefuna continues to negotiate the ambiguity that marks her relationship to place and time. Recently, Hefuna asked her father if she could take the iconic family studio portrait from their Delta home back to Germany with her. He consented, and so it was. Today, that image sits beside her bed - for she has effectively appropriated, and finally, dislodged, that fixed vision of her as a child. In the end, Hefuna has managed to raise questions about the delicate, contested nature of identity at large.

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Leonhard Emmerling
AN ETHIC OF PRECISION*

I. ASSIMILATIVE REPRESSION

Without doubt western culture (European and North American) has a remarkable ability to assimilate that which is originally foreign. I do not understand assimilation in this context to mean the characteristic of a tolerant society which tolerates that which contradicts it; I mean it more in the sense of a process of cancellation, reversal of the mathematical sign, the disempowerment of the sign. One can argue about the source of this ability; in any case its roots reach back to early Christianity, which in turn seems to have only continued a tradition of Rome in the practice of rededicating shrines, for example. Nymphaea thus became baptisteries, and the sheep-strapped, pagan, pastoral Idylls transform into the Christian Good Shepard, much the same as madness of the Maenads, that tore at Orpheus, were transformed into the libidinous hysteria of Maria Magdalena throwing herself onto the body of the dead Christ. The aura of the place, of the picture remains, and yet both disappeared beneath the occupation of the fully new significance. In this sense, assimilation is coupled with the downfall of the other, with its dissolution and destruction, incorporation and appropriation, undertaken with tactical, cunning caution or brutal force based on deep ignorance, driven forward by unquenchable economic and ideological greed.
One need not revert to historical philosophy to be able to say that after the brutal acquisitions of land through colonialism and imperialism, the gentle force of the capitalism developed the technique of assimilation to perfection. The conversion of every value into money, the only valid paradigm of the West, surpasses every martial conquest strategy in its effectiveness because ideological, religious and moral values are left totally untouched. Following the massive upheaval resulting from the 11th of September 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the question arises again about the resistance of the culture factor to those collateral factors such as democracy, the freedom of speech and religion, which leading nations of the western world, the United States, even the United Nations, would like to implement globally. Perhaps these attempts at implementation will fail, on the one hand because the claim to universalism simply represents wishful thinking and is itself culturally determined, and on the other hand, because these attempts lack the seductive charm of value-blind capitalism.
One can see a connection between the global spread of capitalistic pragmatism in the face of every ideology and the increasing integration of works by non-western artist in the western art scene. It seems that, since the defeat of communism, not only is there no longer a need to justify the capitalistic system, which certainly has an inner logic, but the project of the Modern is no longer burdened by the need to justify itself in self-reflection. No longer must the Modern revolve around itself, assuring itself; it can now conquer the world again, following the flow of money, in self-assured, calm movements. The influence of non-European art will no longer be traced to the avant-garde of the Modern, as William S. Rubin most carefully did in 1984 ; now we proudly present Global Art. Every view of the details is a waste of time, it is always about the whole, and the West knows best what the whole is. The entire world speaks West, so that even in rhetoric we do not have to make an effort at dialog, that old-fashioned and unhappy word often characterising the helpless attempt to understand. The West speaks a monologue, even though it speaks with many voices.
What is presented ultimately corresponds to a fully uninterrupted Modern thought, which interprets the phases of the Classic Modern, Post-modern, the Second Modern as nothing more than stages, just like the sequence of Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque etc. and, true to the universalism of the Enlightenment, accepts no historical model by its side other than continual, end-oriented progress until the telos of history. It is the expectation of this, in itself non-dialectic, universalism of the Enlightenment, to ideally be able to understand, categorise and assimilate every phenomenon of mankind and its history. In reality, the dialectic of the Enlightenment means that the inclusion of non-western artists involves the exclusion of art principles outside of this Modern understanding, and therefore the global monopolisation of the western idea of art. Following the inclusion of the art of American and Australian aborigines, the artistic plundering of Oceania, following Exotism, Japanism and Primitivism, following the entire sequence of avaricious, exploitative assimilation, a new trick is employed, a trick that can be described as the principle of assimilative repression. Cultural differences and interculturality are but the labels under which ventures operate; but difference is appreciated merely by the measure it permits artistic activity to confirm itself in a renewed dialectic about-face as enlightened and therefore the claim of universalism. The rhetoric of difference is thoroughly constitutive for the functioning of artistic activity as a method for the continually progressive and comprehensive collection and inclusion of the heteronymous.

II. MASHRABIYAS

Susan Hefuna insists on the cultural difference and resolutely so. As a child of Egyptian and German parents she grew up into two different cultures simultaneously and also experienced the respective influence of different religious ideas. Multiculturality and migration are phenomena from her own biography, natural and problematic at the same time.
The alter egos – the German, the Egyptian – are too distinct and familiar, on the one hand, to be lost in terms like Global Art. On the other hand, at home in Germany and Egypt, the other home is always too near for her to want or to be able to repeat common clichés. As an artist who has knowledge of the breaks, warps, the mixed forms and simultaneities of the difference in both cultures, it is impossible for her to reproduce the monolithic and uninterrupted smoothness that characterises all clichés. She is much more interested in penetrating the micro areas in which one finds the differentiated-problematic and not the symbolic-significant.
In this connection, it seems almost emblemic that her earliest work takes a phenomenon of border demarcation as the starting point: mashrabiyas. These are artistically manufactured masterpieces of the Egyptian art of wood carving that protect the interior of private house from curious gazes from the outside, but simultaneously allow a view from the inside to the outside. They are also the place at which vessels are placed for cooling. Mashrabiya means place of drinking and is phonetically related to mashrafiya meaning place of viewing .
The ornamental lattices of the mashrabiyas continuously reoccur in Susan Hefuna’s drawings and digital processed photographs, and even the small sculptures address the topic of the lattice, although in a highly conceptualised form.
The special role of the mashrabiyas in Susan Hefuna’s work, results from their functional and symbolic ambiguity. Veiled and yet permitting a view to the outside, they close the private room and those found within and yet still allow partial participation in public life. As structural elements, they represent the orderliness of a world which imposes narrow limits on the individual and yet offer the option of an opening.
This is especially apparent in works in which Susan Hefuna’s photographs, reproducing the cliché of the oriental beauty, are overlaid by a mashrabiya pattern. The separation of private and public life finds its counterpart in the differing gender roles. These are reproduced by the West, indulging in its oriental fantasies, with the same obstinacy with which Islam adheres to them to this day.
However, the topic of the border demarcation is also the focus in the works that do not directly deal with the form of the lattice. The computer-processed photographs take Susan Hefuna’s familiar surroundings in the Nile delta as their subject. The apparently traditional family life is the theme in pictures in which several exposures are overlaid, their colour manipulated and combined with latticed or striped patterns.
Whereas the advanced technology of picture and data processing is used here, Susan Hefuna consciously uses an anachronistic photographic technology in the street scenes from Cairo: a pin-hole camera lacking the ability to focus, something that was used on the streets of Cairo until a few decades ago to make passport photos. The exposure occurs in daylight and the film is developed in a small box that the photographer hauls around himself. The customer could thus receive the desired photo after only a few minutes right on the spot.
The archaic photographic technique results in unfocused, blurred, tainted exposure. Unpredictable light effects and dirt during development causes inversions and double exposures – many pictures appear as if they were taken in the nineteenth century. Irregularly torn prints are mounted on backgrounds and photographed again enabling Susan Hefuna to magnify the quasi-historiographic moment of her shots while at the same time underlining the multiple perspectives of her view. The picture (see page XX) thus appears to be a very old, somewhat botched photograph, perhaps taken by a traveller, at an uncertain location that can be generally placed in northern Africa due to the palms. The viewer may wonder about the choice of motif, after all, we have all seen more attractive, tear-resistant pictures of palm trees that would better serve our need for an exotic scene. Only upon closer examination does it turn out that architectural fragments of graves can also be seen.
A young woman sits on a chair in a leaning position in the picture, photographed slightly from above. The photo is scratched and speckled. Upon closer inspection these markings appear to be a front layer of the picture or scratches on a pane of glass behind which the actual photo is located. A veneer of age, a veneer of fictitious history lies between the picture and the motif. The young woman is Susan Hefuna.
The Egypt that the observer, panting at the special holiday offers, can easily reach in a few flying hours, is given a new aura in Susan Hefuna s pictures.
In her photographic works she plays with multiple overlapping structural schemes: What appears to the western observer as foreign, interesting, exotic, has been usual and familiar to her since childhood. To capture this familiarity, the strangeness of which she is aware, she uses a photographic device that has long since disappeared from the streets of Cairo. That which is close to her is placed by an anachronistic technology in a historical distant past that never existed in this way. The simultaneity of different time eras in the photographic picture corresponds to the dating according to both the western and Islamic calendar.
The overlapping, when not paradoxical, is also shown by the choice of medium. After all, the street camera may have been a phenomenon of the everyday Egyptian culture, but it was imported along with the accompanying technology from Europe. That it has been replaced in the meantime by advanced technology, once again originating in the West, is one of those hooks that history throws at us and underlines the dubiousness of wanting to use such marginal appearances to capture cultural or national identity.

III. CAFÉ GROPPI

With an installation at Talaat Harb Square in Cairo, Susan Hefuna took a direct stance on the problem of reproducing cultural clichés and the mantling of the personal image by the western media. Talaat Harb (1867-1941) is regarded as a father of the Egyptian cinema, who not only placed great value on the autonomy of the production resources, but also on the independent content in the films he produced and financed. The Café Groppi, above which Susan Hefuna hung eight banners with pictures of herself, her family, of mashrabiyas and landscape photographs, played an important role in these films as a motif and later became popular with the population as a meeting place.
At this juncture, it is important to once again point out the differentiated problems in the internal organisation of a culture as described above. The Café Groppi is in no way a genuine Egyptian place; it is associated with the attempt to convert the city centre of Cairo into an urban development centre using European architecture. Through the films that made Talaat Harb famous, the café culture there looks without exception to European models. When Susan Hefuna refers to this place as a focus point of Egyptian identity, then this identity has already been succeeded and enriched with that which is foreign. In this respect, she follows the logic she employed with the street camera, in which western technology was used to produce pictures of Egyptian identity.
The Egyptian film industry has also been overrolled by the American, the motifs and stories of local origin and local colour have been exchanged for exotic kitsch which is known to everyone through American monumental films. The banners of Susan Hefuna, which had the effect of advertising billboards, presented the cast of a film. The artist herself was in the centre, photographed with an old street camera, a picture of a woman whose disposition could hardly be more different from the Hollywood starlets.
The image of the veiled half nude, the odalisque and oriental seductress, which was produced for the western market, is undoubtedly ridiculous and stupid. It has its roots in the virtuously concealed erotic fantasies of modern painting in which Cleopatra brings a snake to her breast, in the pictures and photographs of harems, in which prostitutes in the West became models of the available oriental woman, modest and at the same time willing. The photographs of Ré Soupault represent a depressing counterpart to this orientalism, full of sultry odours from the forbidden quarter of Tunis, in which the totally unattractive reason for the sexual availability becomes apparent: the social exclusion, naked necessity.
The picture of the woman, which Susan Hefuna reconstructed for this never made film, represents an standpoint opposite the stereotyped caricatures which still electrify the audiences of belly-dance performances to this today. And however repulsive these caricatures and those who require such stimulation may be, the picture of the woman, to which Susan Hefuna here refers, seems questionable. Is not the fictitious historical distance of this photography Susan Hefuna’s real distance with respect to contemporary Egypt?
Such questions must be allowed, although one is exactly at this moment once again in the spiral of Enlightenment’s universalism. To decline it may seem easy and be justifiable in the case of the art. More difficult is the decision as to whether this enlightened universalism must abandoned as soon as the problem of the human rights becomes the focus. Must one accept ritual mutilations of young girls as practiced for centuries or the marriage of children out of respect for traditions, customs and social structures of particular peoples, for example, or may one condemn and oppose it in the name of universal rights? Are the endeavours of the emancipation of western women aimed at universal rights or do they represent a culturally limited, non-transferable phenomena? In whose name may or must we oppose those who violate human rights and campaign for their observance?
It is only possible to exit the spiral if one respects this other picture and the differences, and if one accepts that the observer is hereby confronted with a, to a certain degree, foreign thing and the judgment of the deprived. The exit from the spiral therefore results in the renunciation of the universalism and the accompanying helplessness, the compulsion for communicative behaviour to bring about pragmatic and temporary agreement, the decision to create common reason as a permanent process. Assimilative repression therefore has no basis if it results from the dominance of one position over another, which is absorbed and dissolved. A communicative reason (Jürgen Habermas) respects agreement as a temporary pact that continually needs confirmation and rephrasing.

IV. FRANKFURT/ODER

Susan Hefuna recently created a localized installation in St. Mary s church in Frankfurt/Oder, where she once again relied on the motif of the mashrabiyas.
The today empty, white order system of the glass windows of St. Mary s church, the panes of which were stored in St. Petersburg after 1945 but have since been returned and will be installed again, was overlaid with an orthogonal, coloured lattice system whose function is a completely different from that of glass windows today. Glass windows in churches sharply separate the secular space from the sacred. From the outside, they seem black, repelling, almost ugly. Their entire fascination reveals itself only to those who enter the sacred room, look up and discover the embers and blaze of colour they emit as soon as the light penetrates into the church through them. Pointedly spoken, their beauty reveals itself only those who enter the church as believers or to someone with sufficient inner freedom to be a adequate partner for discussion with Lessing’s Nathan. Mashrabiyas, in contrast, separate private from the public and not the sacred from the secular.
In contrast to mashrabiyas, one should not be able to look through church windows, one should look at them. They are, in an iconographical sense, difficult to read, highly complex, graphical, theological programs, that at the same time, esthetically serve as a very consistent, almost esoteric concept. Since Panofsky’s treatises on Abbot Suger, who both planned and theoretically supported his own views in building the first Gothic style church, St. Denis, art history has understood the windowing of walls as a metaphysic of light, developed by Abbot Suger with reference to the documents of the so-called Pseudo-Areopagitus . The church windows represent the membrane in which the incomprehensible God becomes visible and is revealed in all his glory to man, in as much he is among those who believe in the active, symbolic presence of God in the light.
In a formal sense, the mashrabiyas contrast absolutely to church wi