Susan Hefuna

Unpacking Europe
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Rotterdam 2001
NAI Publishers
ISBN 90-56-65-233-1

As a child of ...

Unpacking Europe
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Rotterdam 2001
NAI Publishers
ISBN 90-56 62-233-1
Celebrating difference - Leonhard Emmerlling
A child of Egyptian-German parents, Susan Hefuna (1962) grew up simultaneously in Germany and Egypt and was conditioned to a like degree by the cultural setting, Traditions and religious beliefs that characterize the two countries. At home in both places at once, they are by the same token also alien to her. The resulting bipolarity of her gaze has given her the facility to perceive the familiar from an alien perspective, but, (and most importantly) this experience has led her for understand why and which aspects of an alien culture can in the first place produce a sense of the alien in the first place produce a sense of the alien in the eyes of the other.
It is precisely this bipolarity, the simultaneous application of two perspectives, that makes the photographs she shoots using a traditional Egyptian street camera, a camera obscura-particularly those in which she is the subject – so enigmatic. A young woman sitting on a chair with her hands on her thighs. In the background a door, the view of an interior. The image seems so close, yet so undefinably removed in time. Her use of outdated photographic technology, whereby the negative is exposed and a print developed directly on the street, also incurs scratches, dirt and blurring, accidents that create the fiction of temporal distance, something the European viewer associates with intangible topographic remoteness.
The above-mentioned photograph, amongst others, was shown in downtown Cairo, mounted on the façade of the Groppi Café in Talaat Harb Square. Historically, this café has played a double significant role: always a popular meeting-French confectionery and its European flair, it also figures as a favoured location for Egyptian films. The square where the Café Groppi stands is named after one of Egypt’s most famous film producers, Talaat Harb (1867-1941), who attempted to found an indigenous film industry using Egyptian superior economic power of Hollywood, his endeavours have largely been forgotten outside the Arab world. Instead, it was the American epic movie that forged the image of Egypt not only as a home to mummies and Pharaohs, but also as a world that at most harbours the obsequious odalisque, the interminably cloaked Bedouin and the European explorer in his pith helmet.
Yet a certain contradiction in Talaat Harb’s approach cannot be overlooked, since his efforts to champion Egyptian cinema by pursuing specifically Egyptian themes were altogether influenced by European and western tastes. Besides, far from being a genuinely “Egyptian’venue, the Café Groppi was in fact built in the attempt to turn central Cairo into a metropolitan hub by introducing European architecture. Although made famous by Talaat Harb’s films, the coffee house culture in this quarter was modelled entirely on European prototypes. By choosing this location as a focus of Egyptian identity, Susan Hefuna emphasizes how much this identity has already been permeated and enriched by outside elements. The code summoned as a means of constructing identity is revealed in her work to be a hybrid artefact. Renouncing its intrinsic antagonism between Orient and Occident, Susan Hefuna instead draws on both codes at once with the aim of forging them into a radically individual code capable of protecting her personal identity against the encroachments of cultural conditioning.
In her photographic response Susan Hefuna reflects the female image constructed by Egyptian cinema. She underscores the intersection of both perspectives and the mixture of several codes by adding a fake copyright reminder on the margin of each photograph that generates the fiction of historicity: “Greetings from Cairo 1421/2001” Cairo Post Card printed in Germany. This is an allusion to the postcards produced by Lennert and Landrock, which over the last hundred years have created in the west an image of the Orient typified above all by pyramids and half-clad, veiled concubines. Deliberately working in a black-and-white aesthetic, their photographs evoked associations of an eternal past – as though Egypt had always been living in history and had never had a present. Purporting to be scenes from everyday Egyptian life, these pictures were nothing more than a fata morgana concocted with the help of prostitutes and paid models and sold to a western market with an appetite for oriental ist fantasies. Her dual dating method in the inscriptions alludes to the different calendar systems used in Christian and Islamic culture.
Named after a British doctor, the Gayer Anderson House holds special significance for Susan Hefuna’s work because of its extensive collection of ‘mashrabiyas’. These are precious works of skilled craftsmanship, ornate screens that are installed in windows to separate the outside from the inside, to protect the interior from people looking in, while offering a view of the outside world. The mashrabiyas’ lattice-like structures play a crucial role in Susan Hefuna’s drawings and sculptural objects, as well as in her installation,. The Grid. This 8m3 large, cage-like construction is a magnified version of the containers people in Egypt use to carry goods, that serve as display tables for selling fruit or bread or as coops for keeping live animals. Here, however, the receptacle is intended as a place where exhibition visitors can deposit all manner of things: objects, letters, messages – their wishes and memories, their dreams, longings and sufferings.In the course of the exhibition The Grid gradually fills up with such objects and safeguards the personal histories of people whose identities will never be known. A first version of this work was installed in the National Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2000. So great was the interest The Grid created among people of all ethnic and religious groups who would not normally be counted as museum visitors, that the National Gallery decided to purchase this work and place it on permanent public display as he People’s Shrine in Cape Town’s National History Museum.
Susan Hefuna’s purpose becomes clearer when one imagines her work travelling from one location to the next in various countries throughout Europe, becoming increasingly replete. In ideal terms, far from being a complaints box for people to register their worries, The Grid is meant to reflect the variety of identities and cultures that unquestionably exists, but whose sheer diversity can only be surmised. By the end of such an exhibition journey The Grid might be compared with a thesaurus that in all anonymity encapsulates the quintessence of everything that troubles, moves and enthrals people beyond all cultural conditioning.
By intersecting perspectives in this manner, Susan Hefuna is calling for a more precise gaze, one that is capable of recognizing differences. As a migrant between two cultures she seeks out the subtle variations manifested in the deep-set and often contradictory layers beneath every notion. Europe exists no more than the Orient does. It is not just since the spread of globalization strategies, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the removal of national borders within the European Union that this small appendix on the periphery of the Eurasian continent has become a heterogeneous and highly historical root.
Heidegger believed that the rootless ness of occidental thinking derived from the fact that all fundamental texts by major philosophers were handed down only in translation – transcribed, incidentally, both into and from Arabic. Assuming there is a need to deconstruct the very concept of Europe, then every topographic notion that also implies specific cultural identity and, moreover, every instance of cultural identity will also have to be subjected to deconstruction – as Susan Hefuna constantly demonstrates. She embroils the respective codes of each culture in a process of double-talk whose key impact is to highlight the rights of the individual. The bipolarity of the gaze she calls for unveils all that was hitherto concealed and unspoken within the object of inspection; the complex, problematical elements beneath each cultural concept are revealed as the system of referential layers contained within it.
Nonetheless, it must be permitted to query whether Europe’s deconstruction really is the most pressing task facing us. As ever, the art trade is busy chasing the tail of economic change, and is at present endeavouring to keep up with the spread of globalization. Europe has in fact already been deconstructed, both in political and economic terms. Europe has turned into a border zone. What instead is of crucial interest today is the assimilative repression exercised by western capitalism and the magnetic attraction it exerts, and not the concept of Europe, which has long since dissolved into the global economic network and now represents little more than an indistinct point of reference within the convoluted patchwork of world markets. If Europe still has a cultural code of its own, then its fascination surely lies in the enormous economic power it represents, even if in real terms this has long since waned. The majority of those who inhabit the old continent no longer understand the signs that others have appropriated in order to furnish their own culture with greater dignity. These codes now possess hardly any value that might still be imputed to them. It requires the clear-sighted and inquiring work of an artist like Susan Hefuna to shed light on this state of affairs.

Translated by Matthew Partridge