Art

Final Issue: ‘Crop’ challenges dominance of state-produced photos

Maha ElNabawi — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:57:00 +0000

This piece was written for Egypt Independent’s final weekly print edition, which was banned from going to press. We offer you our 50th and final edition here.

In early September 2010, a group of influential global leaders met at the White House in Washington, DC, to talk about peace in the Middle East. As part of diplomatic protocol, the arrangement of the leaders was carefully orchestrated into a symbolic “flying V” as they walked down the red carpet toward the media photo op that followed.

US President Barack Obama led the way, flanked by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordanian King Abdullah II, while former President Hosni Mubarak trailed in the back.

A couple of weeks later, the presidential “flying V” found its spotlight when the state-run newspaper, Al-Ahram published a blatant and seemingly unabashedly doctored photo of Mubarak leading Obama and their counterparts.

The original image, first published by Getty Images, was later altered by Al-Ahram to both bring Mubarak to the front of the group and to place his left foot forward instead of his right — the headline read “The road to Sharm el-Sheikh,” referring to the Egyptian Red Sea resort that hosted the second round of the Middle East negotiations.

The manipulated image quickly became a scandal within both the local and international journalistic communities — it was yet another clear-cut example of just how far state media was willing to go to defend the ruling regime.

But, unless you are one of Al-Ahram newspaper’s 16,000 or so employees, you’ve most likely never had the slightest glimpse of how political the image production process has been inside the institution.

Well, until now, that is.

For the first time in the institution’s 138-year-existence, two young filmmakers found themselves in the right place at the right time, with the right cinematic idea: “Crop.”

Co-directed by Egyptian filmmaker Marouan Omara and German video artist Johanna Domke, “Crop” is an experimental documentary shot entirely within the power center of the country’s images and news — Egypt’s oldest and arguably most influential government media mouthpiece: Al-Ahram.

In a nutshell, the 49-minute documentary film reflects upon the images in the 25 January Egyptian revolution, while placing it in relation to the “image politics” of Egypt’s leaders, from former presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat to Mubarak.

Since Nasser nationalized the paper in 1968, Al-Ahram has been widely known to be something of a mouthpiece for the state. As the film suggests, when Mubarak was ousted and presidential elections were taking place, it was believed that a major power vacuum took place within the institution for several weeks.

“It still took about four months of phone calls, paper pushing, chasing stamps and bribes of course,” says Omara. “We shot around the beginning of June 2012 — there was major reshuffling going on in the newspaper at the time, so there were gaps in authority, which allowed us to get the legal approval to shoot inside.”

From the top-level executive office toward the smallest worker, the camera seamlessly glides the viewer through several floors, from editors’ rooms to the sales floor, the printing press, the kitchen, and even the loading dock.

Amid the typical cacophony of Cairo noise, the film befittingly opens with a black screen and the ethereal voice of the film’s fictionalized narrator, who is a photojournalist at Al-Ahram newspaper.

According to the directors, the narration is based on a montage of testimonies from around 23 journalists, photojournalist and media theorists who have worked within Al-Ahram and Egypt’s state or independent media over the past few decades.

“By creating a fictional character out of the many interviews we carried out, we intended to pay tribute to all of them and not elevate one specific person,” explains Domke. “We created a story in which everybody will be able to recognize a part of himself. We found it very important that the narrator is not visually presented, as it would define the narrator as one person.”

Through this technique, the directors metaphorically challenge the role of images. By framing images within Al-Ahram’s building, the film examines the fallibility of images and the impossibility of objective truth within photojournalism.

At the same time, this rather simple documentary engages viewers to challenge how we perceive images and who is or is not included in the frame of Egyptian state media and, subsequently, society.

One of the main underlying themes is the concept of censorship, which is to be expected. But what the film chooses to emphasize is the debilitating self-censorship exhibited by many workers within Al-Ahram’s institution. The documentary subtly highlights the importance of an active, independent media and citizen journalism in combating state propaganda.

As the film continues, the narrator presents facts regarding each president’s use of images. The narrator attests that Nasser understood the importance of media, images and, most of all, how to naturally pose like a leader.

Sadat, on the other hand, attempted to play the same spotlighted role, but instead, he was often perceived as an actor on a stage that transparently hosted big media events to win adoration from the public.

His media stunts included images of him as a Pharaonic figure with a pole in his hand, a simple man from the countryside with traditional clothing, a family man with his beautiful wife and children and, of course, his famous bathroom pose — taken by his private photographer, Farouk Ibrahim. In this, the former president posed like a “regular man,” shaving in front of the sink wearing only his boxers.

The latter image actually caused a great deal of harm to Sadat’s public perception, since Egyptians were simply not used to seeing a president posing in his underwear.

Having learned from Sadat’s mistakes, Mubarak kept a distance from the media and the public. There were no extravagant events celebrating the great new leader, as in Sadat’s era.

Newspapers would only print pictures of Mubarak at official ceremonies — typically, he would only appear in controlled environments. And moreover, his image would be doctored in controlled environments.

The film also mentions that during Mubarak’s era, Al-Ahram published a picture of the president on its cover nearly every day of his 30-year reign. The only thing that changed over the course of time was that he was aging, which the photo department in Al-Ahram dealt with by retouching his face to “reward him his dignity.”

Towards the end of the documentary, the narrator mentions the discussions in Al-Ahram about the institution’s protocol of framing. For example, those living in the City of the Dead in Cairo were too poor to be represented, a veiled girl could not be shown in the newspaper, and farmers were too far away and too traditional.

The bottom line is that the majority of the Egyptian population was cropped out of the frame of images for close to 60 years, proving that the world we see through the media lens bears almost no honest representation of society at large.

But when the 25 January revolution broke out and thousands took to the street armed with their camera phones, Egyptians consciously or unconsciously challenged and utterly disrupted the state-manufactured images of society.

The people at large took media into their own hands. The film presents the idea that during those 18 days and since, the Egyptian people began fighting the images that had been imposed upon them.

They were shaping, and continue to actively shape, their own images, free from the gatekeepers controlling the images we see, how we see them and when we see them.

For Omara, this is the most crucial aspect of the 25 January revolution. In a way, expression has been liberated and there is no turning back, despite endless political setbacks. Thankfully, technology and the Internet are forces far bigger than any political institution.

Overall, the film provides an excellent account of modern Egyptian political history, in addition to a plethora of stunning and captivating images from Al-Ahram. But what the young directors truly succeed in is presenting the film as a convenient metaphorical vehicle to describe the enervating and bureaucratic nature of Egypt’s state institutions.

In one scene, we see several employees approaching a reception desk of sorts where they punch in their time cards as they enter and leave the building. While Al-Ahram’s office is surprisingly immaculate and advanced, there is something striking about how the institution continues to use analogue and paper-based systems at a time when technology reigns king.

While we may have removed Mubarak, the film challenges the idea that we actually removed his state, which continues to function through robotic, centralized and censored mechanics, seen in almost every branch of government.

As the film ends, it suggests that no matter how the past was portrayed and no matter what the future brings, a major silver lining presented itself in the wake of the 25 January revolution: a populous vision of the way in which humans and technology can act together to generate our own self-determined images — ones that mirror our reality, instead of the scripted, manufactured frame presented by state-controlled media.

We are no longer caught in the suspension of disbelief, but rather, with technology, we can create own collective memories and, hopefully, dictate our own identity.

The film fittingly closes with the last stage of Al-Ahram’s production — a delivery motorbike out on the streets playing singer Abdel Halim Hafez’s song “Soura.”

Hafez sings: “Image, image, image/Everybody deserves an image/Whoever leaves the frame will be left out of the image.”

Final Issue: Five great films, books and works of art

Steven Viney,Maha ElNabawi,Jenifer Evans,Ali Abdel Mohsen,Mai Elwakil — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:02:00 +0000

This piece was written for Egypt Independent’s final weekly print edition, which was banned from going to press. We offer you our 50th and final edition here.

From street art to a kitsch 1970s film, books that capture the zeitgeist to a striking bio-art exhibit, our writers share some of their cultural highlights.

‘Ghost Factory’ by Ghaith El-Lawzi

Written by Steven Viney

Ghaith El-Lawzi’s 2005 semi-autobiographical novel, “Ghost Factory,” was the first modern Egyptian book — also published in English — that really struck a nerve deep within me.

The novel reflects a zeitgeist of nihilism for some of those who came of age under former President Hosni Mubarak in the mid- to late 1990s. Hence, it was instantly easy to relate to.

Aged 20 when I first read the book, it became my personal version of Albert Camus’ “The Outsider,” personalized simply because it took place in Cairo and featured a soundtrack of popular songs of the time, as well as a cast of shady, hopeless characters that bore strong resemblances to many of the people I met growing up.

Though the book’s writing style now seems a little youthful for my taste, a few of its themes are still as pertinent as ever and offer a great archive, albeit semi-fictional, of what life under Mubarak was like.

The young characters in the novel are either born wealthy or end up in nowhere jobs, often strung out on drugs, and sometimes dying unnecessarily young — something I witnessed over and over as a youth in Cairo, either due to car crashes or some idiosyncratic occurrence.

The book also unveils a much darker side of Mubarak’s regime, featuring villa parties where ministers engage in extreme debauchery with young women, often forcibly. It shone light on the city’s huge hotel prostitution industry, the drug business fueled by the government, and all sorts of corruption and pitiful behavior within the lifestyles of the wealthier classes.

It was the first time I had seen the Cairo I knew written about so blatantly.

For anyone who now longs for the Mubarak days, I recommend reading this book to understand exactly what it was like to have been a 20-year- old under Mubarak in 1999, let alone in 2010, when things had reportedly become far worse.

The Alexandria street art gallery

Written by Maha ElNabawi

Shortly after Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011, I found myself in the seaside town of Alexandria on the hunt for cultural stories. Around that time, an interesting new street art project was taking shape along the once-barren walls of the Lycee al-Horreya Theater.

Organized by the Goethe-Institut Alexandria and local curator Fatma Hendewy, a team of local and foreign street artists worked day and night to transform the weathered walls into a kaleidoscope of color as they each painted massive murals spreading several meters wide.

The two-part project featured commissioned works by Alexandria-based artists, including Aya Tarek and Amr Ali, in addition to fantastic murals by some of Europe’s leading artists, including Mercedes De Gary (Spain), Ma’Claim (Germany), and MICKRY 3 and TIKA (Switzerland).

In this magnificent outdoor public gallery of sorts, with murals up to 4 meters wide, each piece is perfectly packed with symbolism, high-quality aesthetics and electrifyingly vibrant colors, which all culminate in a myriad of stunning expression.

For those lowbrow art lovers who find themselves dazed, confused, and awestruck by the ever-changing murals on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in downtown Cairo, it is highly recommended that you take a little trip to Alexandria to view this entirely fresh body of street art and colorful expression.

After visiting the outdoor gallery again a few weeks ago, I noticed that several new pieces have emerged in the time since the original murals were magically painted. The gallery continues to spread, organically, through the tattered graffiti of younger generations reminding us again that walls do talk when people have something to say.

‘The Black Dot’ by Waleed Taher

Written by Jenifer Evans

Waleed Taher’s square children’s book “The Black Dot” is about some children who wake up one day to find a huge black dot in their playing field. Upset, they try to guess what it could be, then try to get rid of it, then try to utilize it.

The whimsical drawings of stick people are washed out, smudgy colors that look like they could have been made by a child. They are basic, uneven, elaborate, out of control and funny.

This exuberant childishness is often evident in Taher’s work. In “The Black Dot,” no grownups appear in the story at all — the children are completely capable of sorting out the problem themselves.

Although it was published in 2010, it seems to have revolutionary connotations.

In the face of the mysterious dot, the group comes together, bounces around ideas to figure out what to do with the thing that is taking up their space, disagrees and gets nowhere, but ultimately triumphs through perseverance and creativity. It is hard not to see it as an allegorical dot.

There is a fair bit of text alongside the illustrations, but it’s poetic and fun to read. Also, it’s not too difficult to read if you’re not great at Arabic.

‘Al-Nadaha’ by Hussein Kamal

Written by Ali Abdel Mohsen

It may not be a great film, but as far as I’m concerned, viewing experiences are rarely as rewarding as when you’re watching “Al-Nadaha” (1975). Although its onscreen English titles read “For Whom the Wind Calls,” a more direct and accurate translation would simply be “The Siren.” True to its name, the film is a hypnotic and seductive work.

Dissatisfied with village life, young Fatheya yearns to “see the world,” by which she means “Egypt,” which is how the residents of her remote village refer to the distant megapolis that is Cairo.

It’s not an uncommon desire; villagers are often driven to insanity by the call of the siren and, when it grips Fatheya, the only solution is to quickly marry her off to her former neighbor Hamed, now a doorman in the big city.

Although based on a novella by acclaimed author Youssef Idris, the film’s storyline is almost secondary — you watch “Al-Nadaha” like you live a dream. Calmly melodramatic, repetitive in its theme music, kitschy in its depiction of “progress” and populated by stereotypes and the world’s sleaziest scientist, the film isn’t as concerned with realism as it is with depicting the world through the eyes of the bewildered Fatheya, who spends her first night in her husband’s Cairo room experimenting incredulously with the light switch.

Watch it once the way it was meant to be watched, then put the sound off, pick some good music, turn the colors all the way up and fall into it.

‘Ioconography’ on the Sixth Floor

Written by Mai Elwakil

All the art projects shown on “The Sixth Floor” should be picks. As with the Hal Badeel (Alternative Solution) arts festival held earlier this month, the artists, along with the curator, collaborated on every possible detail to bring the group show to life.

They cleaned and fixed the creaking walls of the old Viennoise Hotel, and took on shifts to welcome the many visitors. Throughout the week, you’d find visitors and artists hanging out and chatting. And, of course, the artists produced their projects. All 15 works were fully developed projects, rather than a random response to a curator’s invite. I choose to highlight one that swept me off my feet.

At the far end of the flat hosting the exhibit, a dimly lit room hosted the work of Heba El Aziz, “Ioconography.” Its aesthetic simplicity was heartening. Circular glass lenses hung on the wall. In each lay a photograph of an Egyptian icon, for better or for worse. From comedian Adel Imam and the late songstress Om Kalthoum to King Farouk and even Gamal Mubarak, but also the late Pope Shenouda III, Mubarak-era Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq and journalist Ibrahim Eissa.

Each photo gradually decolorized, taking on different hues of greens, blues, grays and an occasional spray of red. As I kept going back to take yet another look, Aziz’s icons continued to transform.

Aziz is one of the very few artists working with bio-art in Egypt. She is a bio-painter, who uses glass plates and photographs as her canvas, and bacteria she carefully cultures as her color palette.

Like all forms of life, that of the icons included, the bacteria changes over time. It is a live temporal art and watching it develop, I developed some attachment to it, fascinated, as it captured a cycle of life.

An artistic duo re-presents a dying art in Cairo starting tonight

Mai Elwakil — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:38:00 +0000

As they walked out from “I’m Nobody’s Shadow” onto the streets of the ancient city of Tunis, audiences couldn’t help but smile. The 20-minute long performance, shown in September as part of the Dream City biennale, was fun and stimulating for all those who attended. And that is essential to the Frinis’ practice.

Marion Frini relates it to her “inability to be serious.” And a quick look at Ghazi Frini’s vimeo channel and VJing performances highlights his humor and playfulness. But the artistic duo is dead serious; they direct all their creative energy into experimenting with their once seemingly disparate practices, and reaching out to a wide audience. To them, humor is key.

The Frinis performed “I’m Nobody Shadow” in a small room on the top floor of an abandoned theater. Marion’s shadow, along with live footage of her performing, appears on the screen playing around with the gigantic shadow of a birdcage and a chair. Occasionally, the chair would disappear from beneath her and so would the cage which she refuses to enter. With this, the duo was able to turn a much overworked theme, that of “Artists facing freedom,” into an exciting experience for the group sitting in the room with the real birdcage at its center.

Marion explained later how some audience members told her they were looking for a marionette of her inside the cage lying in front of them, trying to grasp how they saw the cage and chair whose shadows were cast, but not her own although they could hear her footsteps as she moved.

“Part of our idea was to make the audience lose perception; how could there be a shadow of a body with no body?” explains Ghazi. “But eventually people get the trick and play along,” adds Marion.

The Frinis are the first and, for now, the only artists in Tunisia mixing shadow theater, one of the oldest art forms, with one of the most recent, live Vjing. But, before they met in 2008 and began working together, their practices seemed quite unconnected.

Marion, a French artist from Lyon, has been dancing since her childhood, and gradually moved to the more improvisational side of performance with her interest in theater growing by the day. Ghazi, from Tunis, had experimented with sculpture and puppet making, marionettes and Shadow Theater, but dropped it all – at least temporarily – for the sake of video.

Being passionate about music and wanting to explore the potential of video away from commercial venues, he started VJing with a number of electronic musicians in 2007, including Zein Abdelkafi, aka Hayej. He also worked with dancers and actors; his videos being the backdrop for their performance, like with Feriel Folla in 2007 in support of the anti-globalization movement. He experimented with software and wanted to go into video mapping. But limited resources and bureaucracy stood in his way.

“But sometimes limited resources at hand can make you look in directions you would not have otherwise,” he explains. Ghazi began searching for a subject for his video projections, a person with whom he could literally incorporate the performative elements into his work.

Luckily, he met Marion, they immediately clicked – in fact they fell in love and got married – and started working together.

“We started filming together on the street with Marion as the subject. And after we went home, we would work on the footage to create a kind of filmed performance,” says Ghazi.

In their early works, their collaboration was in the form of visual play attuned to music pieces by other artists and friends. In “1983,” Marion’s physical expression was combined with Ghazi’s illusionary techniques, often manipulating the audience with the many layers.

The real breakthrough came, however, when they were invited in late 2010 by the Atelier D collective to create a performance in response to the Spanish classic “Don Quixote.” In it Marion’s shadow appears from behind a squared white screen and she begins to dance like a marionette hallucinating inside a box. But then Ghazi contrasts her shadow with a mesmerizing landscape that appears and disappears and continuously changes, affecting the space she has left in the box, both hers and her shadows which Ghazi also projects. To also mess around with the audiences’ perception, Ghazi wore dark glasses and pretended to be visually impaired as he sat among the audience and VJed live.

“Don Quixote was the real beginning,” says Marion. “We were both creating. We thought and constructed everything together.”

That was their first work with shadow play and allowed them to combine and experiment with their interests in music, performance, video and story telling. They would discuss the various ideas they had in response to a story or even experiment with visuals they found interesting to try and develop a story from that, constantly trying different combinations until they agreed on a final format, which was also often tweaked spontaneously during the live performance. If either one feels inclined to try out something new during the performance, they go ahead, and the other is able to play off it. And while they have been mostly using music by other artists as a soundtrack to their works, in their most recent performance “I’m Nobody’s Shadow,” they made the music themselves.

“We started with the visuals, while having a rhythm and structure in our heads, so when we came to make the music in the end, it easily came through in relation to the performance we had already created,” says Marion.

They have since been pushing their collaboration further, trying different ways, with their performance scheduled in Cairo this week, promising that Marion will no longer be behind the screen.

The Frinis will perform a version of "I'm nobody's shadow" on 24 and 25 April at 4pm and 6pm, and on 27 April on 2pm and 7pm at the Viennoise Hotel, 11 Mahmoud Basiony St., downtown, Cairo.

This piece was originally published in Egypt Independent's weekly print edition.

The pick: Bahr Abu Greisha’s ‘Rahhal’

Ali Abdel Mohsen — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 13:21:00 +0000

Whether you want to dance the drunken night away, or wallow in solitary self-pity, Bahr Abu Greisha is your man. I don’t know much about the singer, but I know enough to strongly recommend him to anyone with a working ear or two and a heart capable of being broken.

Abu Greisha, like his first name suggests, sings the songs of a man lost at sea, or, in this case, a swirling whirlpool of confusion, despair and mind-altering loneliness. Occasionally, he’ll wash up on the shores of some island sanctuary, find love and sing something effortlessly beautiful about it. But, like all true poets, he’ll quickly work his way to heartbreak, if only to have a reason to throw himself back into the sea while wailing something so depressing that you’ll race him to do the same.

Nowhere is this tragic trajectory laid out more clearly — and rewardingly — than on his album “Rahhal” (“Wanderer”) and its title track, a 17-minute odyssey into the mind of a wandering soul. It is a journey through a world deserted after the loss of a lover.

Abu Greisha sings of endless nights and the ghosts that haunt them, and of swimming against the current and drowning. He sings of misery and woe, but also of those rare moments that give us the strength to push through. It never sounds bitter or resentful; even at his most melancholy, the defiance in his voice is a buoy bobbing on dark waters, a solid shoulder to cry on in a melting mess of a world.

For Al-Khayal Al-Shaabi theater troupe, Egypt is a dynamic stage

Naira Antoun — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:09:00 +0000

The crowd gathers quickly. In a burst of color and sound, the troupe drums, sings and dances, leading the growing crowd until they settle on a spot. The actors — each dressed in monocolor, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, white and one in gray — create a space around them and encourage those gathered around to sit, ensuring they do not settle too close.

This little negotiation with the gathered crowd, which is now becoming an audience, can take a few minutes. The stage is being created.

This is central to the thinking behind what theater troupe Al-Khayal Al-Shaabi (The Popular Imagination) does. The stage is not something that pre-exists, with lighting, equipment and whatnot. A stage can be anywhere.

Deriving ideas and practice from Poor Theater, Theater of the Oppressed, Bertolt Brecht and others who worked on bringing theater closer to ordinary people instead of it being something for the elite, Al-Khayal Al-Shaabi has been doing street theater since 2002, well before the revolution.

“There is no stage, no lights, nothing — you have to do everything. Of course it is harder, but it is way more satisfying,” says Abdelrahman Adel.

He and Abdallah Mohamed are the youngest members of the troupe. They have been involved for two years now, coming into contact with Mustafa Wafi and Shaker Said, both part of Al-Khayal Al-Shaabi, when they were training them as part of their work at the Jesuit Cultural Center in Ramses.

For each production, the group chooses a theme and a method, and then finds a director. The current theme is revolution, and the method chosen was clowning. The group members improvised for a couple of months, and Spanish director Pepa Diaz worked with them.

“The Colors of the Revolution” was the result, a story of different colors trying to realize their dreams against the oppression of the gray dictator.

Though the production has sometimes been billed as children’s theater, it is not specifically for children.

“It is street theater, so it is for all generations,” Wafi says.

“The idea in all our productions is for the language to be simple, and for it to be really visual,” adds troupe member Marwa Hussein.

Each color tries to realize its dreams, but blocking them is one color, gray. He steals their paint, he dominates them, he forbids them from painting anything. The colors revolt.

And in a twist of one of the revolution’s slogans, “The one who chants will not die,” they shout out, “The one who paints will not die.”

Painting in this story represents not only the capacity to live well but to realize hopes and aspirations. They call out the dictator for oppression, corruption, police violence, bad education — all that led to the explosion of the revolution.

One of the troupe’s early productions, “Ta3l Bos” (Come, Look), which was comprised of five scenes dealing with women’s lives, took object theater as its method. The troupe’s latest production before the revolution, “Corombe Zabadi” (Cabbage Yoghurt, a popular phrase reflecting when things are messed up and confused with one another), was about migration.

Using the buffoon, a type of clown, as its method, it looked at how when we try to escape to go somewhere better, we find that there are hierarchies and oppression there too.

Improvisation is not confined to the initial stages of conceiving the play, however. Given the nature of their work in public spaces, they have to be quite responsive to the crowd — a crowd that varies in size, as people may come and go.

One of the troupe members might decide to jump ahead and start singing a song that comes later to signal to the other actors that they are skipping a bit. They make other changes in rehearsals and through discussions.

The dictator has not been gray for long. Until a couple of months ago, he was dressed all in black. At one of their productions, a member of the audience started taunting a dark girl, associating her with the villain of the production.

“We were also about to do some performances in Nubia, so I think we would have talked about it and changed it, even if that incident with the girl had not happened,” actress Naima Mohsen says.

Little changes are made, in particular with the gray character. He might, for instance, mimic a recent comment made by President Mohamed Morsy or make reference to recent events.

“He is both Morsy and all dictators,” Mohsen explains.

At some point in the production, he mimics a phrase former Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi delivered in one of his last speeches.

“But really, it is not that we change the play to fit the circumstances,” Hussein adds. “It is that developments in the country keep the play relevant.”

Early last year, the troupe performed in the Cairene neighborhood of Imbaba, but had to abort the performance.

“Some people begged us to stay, but really they should not have been talking to us. They should have been talking to those stopping us,” Mohsen says. “Still, it all happened very quickly, and there were rumors that some Salafis were on their way.”

Mostly, it is not aggression they encounter. Performer Ruth Jurado Castillo recalls going to a village in Minya, when “people of all ages were trying to touch us and pull on our hair. It was not violent, it was just they had not seen anything like this before.”

Sometimes the ethos of the group can clash with the institution that has invited them.

“We talk to staff beforehand, telling them we do not need their interventions,” Mohsen says.

She recalls that with a previous performance at a detention center, “the children did not laugh, and we thought our production was not funny, but actually it was that the children could not laugh.”

“Or that they did not have space to laugh,” Jurado Castillo cuts in.

The troupe has now been doing performances at the detention center for a few years, and their rapport with the children has built.

“Recently, it was hot and a weekend, and the teachers asked if it was OK that they did not attend. And really, it was much better,” Mohsen recalls.

What was interesting about performing there, Jurado Castillo says, “is that the children identified with Shaker, the one dressed in black. When he was being judged, the children were calling for him to be let free, and it was because they were also imprisoned.”

The troupe has performed this production far more widely and frequently than previous productions. At 70 performances and counting, it far surpasses their previous ones, which they sometimes did not perform more than 15 times.

“Before the revolution, it was rarely street theater,” Wafi says. “The performances were open, but often in the premises of organizations or schools.”

While this continues to be the case, the troupe has been able to perform on the street itself a number of times. And they perform in all sorts of institutions, even at the Abbasseya Mental Health Hospital.

Or an audience might be made up of children on a trip with their local mosques, as with their recent performance in Badrashin as part of the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival, or D-CAF. Mosques in surrounding villages brought the children on minibuses, as they do on other trips, for instance to the fairground or Al-Azhar Park.

At the moment, the troupe is in discussion with someone who has invited them to perform as part of another festival, and has asked them to wear wireless mics.

“We have refused,” Wafi says. “He wants us to perform with mics to an audience of about 5,000, so there would be no audience interaction. He wants us to make an exception, but we cannot. If you do that, you have broken the idea before you have even started the performance.”

“The main change though has been the reactions of people, not the audiences so much as the organizers inviting us. There used to be much more reluctance about all things political and we would be asked to tone it down,” Wafi says.

“Now political criticism and discussion has become much more normal, and it rarely happens these days,” he adds.

“We reach people who would not see theater,” Mohamed, 19, says. “I love it because we go to people, rather than waiting for them to come to us.”

D-CAF picks of the week

Egypt Independent — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:16:00 +0000

The Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival offers in its final week an exciting program for the community of Downtown Cairo.

SMSlingshot

This interactive outdoor installation by VR/urban of Germany enables people to reclaim urban space. Text messages can be typed on a phone-sized keypad, which is integrated into a wooden slingshot. The user then aims at a media facade and shoots the message straight to the targeted point.

18–20 April, 7–9 pm

Cafe under Egyptian Media Development Program

10 Elwy St., behind the Egyptian Exchange, Downtown, Cairo

White Rabbit Red Rabbit

Actor Ramsi Lehner will perform in English a play on authority by Iranian artist Nassim Soleimanpour. Lehner will read the script for the first time on stage with no props, rehearsals or directing, leaving space for improvisation.

18 April, 8 pm

AUC Falaki Theater

24 Falaki St., off Mahmoud Basiony St., Downtown, Cairo

Sadat, El Rass & Munma

Since his debut in shaaby weddings four years ago, Sadat’s popularity has skyrocketed. He mixes rap with shaaby music and his lyrics are inspired by street culture with all its social problems. The Lebanese El Rass and Munma released their first collaborative album in early 2012. The encounter between El Rass’ lyrical armada of rap, poetry and slammed vocals, and Munma’s electronic genius creates a musical universe of evocative sounds, melodies and beats.

18 April, 10 pm

Shahrazad Night Club

Alfi Bey Street, off Oraby Square, Downtown, Cairo

‘In the Eye of the Storm’ film night

This night is dedicated to documentary films about peaceful social movements and civil disobedience around the world. It starts with “The Thing Next Door” by Antje Hubert (Germany), followed by “Tous au Larzac” by Christian Rouaud (France) and “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” by Alison Klayman (US). “The Things Next Door” and “Tous au Larzac” will be rescreened at Falaki Theater on 22 and 23 April, respectively. “Ai Weiwei” will be rescreened on 24 April at AUC Oriental Hall in Tahrir Square.

19 April, 10 pm

Radio Cinema

24 Talaat Harb St., Downtown, Cairo

‘Face the Vitrine’

This installation by Ganzeer and Yasmine Elayat takes place in the window of a public storefront so that the street and passing pedestrians are involuntary participants. It blurs the line between private and public space, explores how it feels to be watched and exposes our gender and identity dynamics.

22–28 April, 10 am to 5 pm and 6 pm to midnight

Mahmoud Basiony shopfront

11 Mahmoud Basiony St., Downtown, Cairo

‘I’m Nobody’s Shadow’

This live, interactive performance by the Tunisian duo Marion and Ghazi Frini brings video art and shadow theater together. It is about a shadow, free from the body that produced it, that evolves between dream and reality, happiness and discomfort.

24–25 April, 4 pm and 6 pm; 27 April, 2 pm

Viennoise Hotel

11 Mahmoud Basiony St., Downtown, Cairo

For the complete program of events, please visit www.d-caf.org

A Q&A with leading mahraganat singer Sadat

Ali Abdel Mohsen — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:19:00 +0000

It’s not shaaby, and it’s not moulid music. It’s a mahragan, or a “festival,” and Sadat should know, considering he’s the one who coined the term, proudly so.

“We were the first ones to ever perform this type of music, I don’t care else what you might’ve heard,” he shouts over the phone. “The proof is online, sir. Check the post dates and then we’ll see who’s lying. Ask the people on the street, they know the truth.”

Twenty-six-year-old Al-Sadat Mohamed Ahmed — or, as he prefers to be known, Sadat — is as excitable as he is versatile. Having started off as a dancer, he moved on to entrepreneurship with his own “DJ agency” before settling into his most recent incarnation: a lo-fi rapping sensation who, by his own admission, is listened to by “half the population” and performs in “sold out venues abroad.”

While his various YouTube videos haven’t broken any records, they have amassed some impressive numbers, some being viewed more than 3 million times. Sadat, who sees himself as one of the creators — along with his friends, neighbors and frequent collaborators, DJ Figo and Alaa Fifty — of a new genre, is confident the reason behind his popularity is obvious, even if his music isn’t.

Egypt Independent: You say there’s some confusion about the type of music you perform ...

Sadat: I don’t know why people call it shaaby music. It’s not. Shaaby music is Tarek al-Sheikh. It’s a totally different sound. And moulid music is even more different but people put us in that category too, even though the styles aren’t similar and moulid songs are usually performed for a specific purpose.

I don’t know what’s wrong with people. We have our own name to make it clear we perform something else entirely.

EI: Mahraganat?

Sadat: Yeah, and before us, there wasn’t such a thing. There’s always been shaaby and there’s always been the moulid, but when we started doing what we do, nobody else was doing it.

We’d make our songs and exchange them over mobile phones. And the songs weren’t good — it wasn’t about the music as much as it was about the jokes in our lyrics, the one-liners and shout-outs, which would get more people interested in listening to the songs.

But there was this realization of “hey, we can make music,” and we got better at that part and the songs started to be shared on a wider level.

EI: So how’s the music different? What sets a mahragan apart from a moulid or a shaaby song?

Sadat: A mahragan is all about power. It’s the full force. And music is power.

You have to feel it. You see this power in the live performances, you see me gradually getting more and more into it. For example, we never lip-sync in live performances.

That would be pointless — the audience already has tapes they can listen to at home or in their cars. Other people lip-sync. You might know who they are but I won’t name names.

EI: A lot of artists lip-sync, for better or worse. Do you think the extra effort, on your part, is appreciated by audiences?

Sadat: It’s appreciated by me. If I wasn’t capable of performing live — actually performing — I would have been screwed when I went to France.

I was in France recently for a performance and I only found out when I got there everything was going to be live. You don’t want me to perform live? Tell me what I would have done then.

EI: I’m not against you performing live.

Sadat: I always perform live. I like to prove myself as an artist.

EI: How did you end up with “mahragan”?

Sadat: We wanted a name that was as big as the music and something that also sounded classy. And what’s bigger or fancier than a mahragan?

Ask anyone to describe a mahragan for you and they won’t be able to — it’s too big. All they can say about a mahragan is that it’s huge and loud, and full of power.

EI: What about content? What characterizes mahragan music, other than big sounds and power?

Sadat: It depends on who’s making it. Some people are only making mahragan music because it’s a trend. You might know them, but I won’t name anyone.

But other people take it seriously. We use it as a platform to talk about things that everyone thinks about, but nobody says — social issues.

EI: Why is it possible for mahragan musicians to say things nobody else can?

Sadat: It’s more about how we say things. There’s a level of honesty you don’t find in other genres.

[Sadat bursts into two verses of a rap full of state security forces, firearms and general chaos.]

That’s from my song “Al-Shaab wal Hokuma” (The People and the Government). You won’t hear lyrics like that in other types of music.

Or when I rap about things like ... [he offers another two verses detailing how a “strange” girl on the street called her uncle and grandfather for protection after Sadat, or the song’s first-person narrator, rubbed himself up against her]. People didn’t like that one.

EI: Yeah. That’s understandable, though.

Sadat: They were mad at the word I used for “rubbed up against her,” because that’s what they thought I meant.

EI: You also have this other song I wanted to ask you about. The title roughly translates to “I’ll Catcall, But I Won’t Grope.”

Sadat: I have to be honest — my friend wrote the lyrics, I only collaborated on that. But I do write most of my songs. That song in particular came out of me wanting to do something to address this issue.

Musicians always talk about problems, so let’s offer solutions for once. And sexual harassment is a problem.

Years ago, you’d have to have a ride if you wanted to grope, so you could quickly escape. Now, people grope as they’re walking down the street.

So I talked about it in that context. I even say in the song that catcalls are unnecessary and not the sort of behavior I engage in.

Some people say it’s still a form of sexual harassment — catcalls. I don’t know. I’m just saying in this song, if you absolutely have to, keep it to catcalling.

But some people still aren’t happy. They call us ignorant and our songs worthless, which isn’t true.

EI: Generally speaking, shaaby music — which your music has strong roots in — has always been received this way, which usually ends up adding to its popularity.

Sadat: Yes, but there’s no need to bash us.

If I don’t like Om Kalthoum, does that make her worthless? No. Does it make me an asshole? Says who?

And when someone like [musician] Helmy Bakr calls us “ignorant” on a TV show, what is that? Let me tell you about Helmy Bakr ... People attack us for our tastes, when maybe we should be attacking them for theirs.

Look at the crap on Starmaker and Arab Idol and those shows. Those people are singing nonsense.

EI: Do you feel there are people in the mahragan scene who do warrant that type of criticism?

Sadat: Absolutely — in every scene, but ours especially, because it’s new and popular. You have people who steal songs all the time, slightly changing the lyrics around.

Basma Gallal, for example — I didn’t want to name anyone, but we had a song called “Wishak wal Kahraba” (Your Face and Electricity), and she took it and changed it to “Widnak wal Kahraba” (Your Ear and Electricity). That doesn’t even make any sense, and it makes us all look stupid. Check it online.

So we responded by making a song about her stealing our song. This is how it works. There’s rivalry. The rivalry between Figo and I against Oka and Ortega shook the country.

You didn’t hear about it? After our last track, they couldn’t show their faces for months.

EI: As someone who’s faced criticism for their lyrics, where do you feel Egypt currently stands with the concept of freedom of expression. What responsibility do you feel you have in that respect, as an artist?

Sadat: The people are what need to change. You can’t learn the law unless it’s been enforced, and people need to learn it.

Anywhere else in the world, laws are followed because the people understand why they have been placed, and how to follow them. But freedom of expression suffers from the same problem that affects everything else in Egypt: negativity.

Look at someone like Bassem Youssef. Personally, I don’t like him, but the point is: Why doesn’t he use his resources to help instead of mock and make fun?

Have a fun show one week, and then another serious one the following week, where you expose scandals. Stop complaining and do something positive.

EI: Are you feeling positive?

Sadat: I try to spread a positive message, through solutions, like I said. But as long as [President Mohamed] Morsy’s squatting in the president’s chair, I’m not optimistic at all, no.

It’s all going to go up in flames. Both sides are riling each other up and if it hits the fan, you can be sure the outside world won’t intervene in a way that’ll benefit us. It’s going to go like Syria. We’ll all turn to dust.

Sadat, along with Lebanese hip-hop artists El Rass and Munma will perform as part of the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival on 18 April at 10 pm at Shahrazad Night Club in downtown Cairo.

‘The Magic of the State’: An ambitious and relevant art show in Cairo

Jenifer Evans — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:40:00 +0000

“The Magic of the State,” held last month at the Beirut art space in Agouza, took a lot of time. Dreamy and odd, but also super-informative if visitors wanted it to be, the four pieces on the villa’s ground floor and the three fairly lengthy sound/video pieces upstairs took more than one visit to grasp, not to mention the option of attending the three events that accompanied the exhibition, an off-site project, and Beirut’s library — to fill oneself in on events and theories that were alluded to in the artworks.

Fortunately the show was enjoyable. It had been installed with an attention to detail that seems fairly rare for a show in Cairo’s low-budget art scene, and certain themes or motifs connected to its title popped up — money, Greece, Sun Ra, religion, borders, mysterious diagrams, strange hand gestures — in various works.

Downstairs artist Christodoulos Panayiotou displayed some quite hilarious archival photos of a robed religious figure walking ritualistically, puppet-like, among different types of crowd. Nearby he also showed some photos of people in a museum looking in a bemused way at a huge naked god statue, who looked like he might be doing a camp dance.

There was also Rana Hamadeh’s beautifully made cabinet with various drawers and surfaces that visitors could examine, filled with images and objects that relate to the performative talk she gave on 7 March. And there was a small, barely-there piece by Ryan Gander, opposite two massive boards with words by the musician Sun Ra copied out — “What America Needs” and “There Are Two Ethiopias” — by artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar, which were used in her collaborative performance on 3 March.

Upstairs, there was a two-channel video by Liz Magic Laser called “The Digital Face.” One showed a man dressed in a full-body leotard, raised above the heads of a patient-looking audience, and the other was identical except the performer was a woman and the gestures they made were quite different. It turns out that he was mimicking the movements of George Bush’s 1990 state of the union address, and she was copying Barack Obama’s from his 2012 version. It is uncanny how spot-on they are.

There was also a visually striking video installation by Anje Kirschner and David Panos called “Ultimate Substance.”The video is a slickly produced collage of different types of scenes, filled throughout with cicada sounds and the cracking noises of stone hitting stone. There were close-ups of muscled bodies covered in metallic dirt, eating or sorting stones and moments of taut bronzed bodies cracking their bones on a green screen. In contrast there were pale blemished contemporary bodies in a kitchen, a milk carton dropped on the floor, and motorbike drivers racing on a quarry. There were sections with a black screen and inexplicable shifting geometric diagrams or a voiceover about democracy.

In the library, an essay by Richard Seaford in a catalogue for Kirschner and Panos’ “Ultimate Substance” shown at Secession last year, explains how much of the film was shot in the silver mines of Lavreotiki, Greece, and that silver formed the basis of Athens’ prosperity in classical antiquity, and the first pervasively monetized society contributed to a massive shift in the way Greeks imagined the cosmos: power became impersonal, attached to a semi-abstract substance. All it had required, apparently, was collective confidence in money’s conventional value.

This idea followed on nicely to the last work in the show, by Goldin+Senneby, called “The Decapitation of Money.” In an almost completely dark room, Angus Cameron (an economic geographer) spoke from a TV monitor on the ground about the more recent history of money in relation to Bataille’s ambiguous idea of sovereignty. It’s a surprisingly entertaining story that includes the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping in the 1450s, an explanation of how banknotes were convertible into silver until the late 18th century, the creation of Eurodollars in 1957 (letting money escape into a fictional legal space dislocated from the state), all the way to naked short-selling, weather futures, and, basically, the “dark forest of money” we are in now.

“We’re trying to claw back sovereign control,” says the narrator of the current situation. Every now and then, a light clicked on and off four times and on one of the room’s black walls one briefly glimpsed some sort of map or diagram.

The show was named after a 1997 book by Michael Taussig, an anthropologist whose semi-fictional ethnographical writings have perhaps made him more famous in the contemporary art world than in his own field. His art-aura of celebrity drew crowds to Beirut on 5 March, when he gave a talk, so many people that they were spread out, standing up, all over the ground floor – a fairly small proportion got to sit in the space where he was rather quietly speaking. The talk meandered and for stretches of it those at the back heard little more than mumbles with the occasional exclamation, such as “We didn’t talk about the kids!” — but nuggets of substance meant it was somehow worthwhile.

“States exude a magical force without which there are no states,” he said, talking of spies and magic realist novels and phone tapping and his own experiences with a healer in southwest Columbia. He spoke of the magic of the art of immigration officers, describing a moustache seen though a hole in dark glass and a mysterious piece of paper that lets you pass (or not). He talked how states are born through violence, and about riot police and their grotesque, suddenly global uniform – he pointed out the codpiece with glee – and said that it is evidence of a need to scare people, create a spectacle, to change the face of reality. He spoke about attraction and repulsion and loyalty to the state; about how states and religion create intimacy, and how there are magical unknown dangerous things outside of civilization.

Reynaud-Dewar’s performance (“Interpretation”) involved a performer called Mary Knox who dramatically read aloud from Sun Ra’s texts and musician Hendrik Hegray who used a Kaossilator and other electrical devices, as well as a photographer documenting them. At the same time, Reynaud-Dewar played some amazing jazz records. The audience crowded up to two double-doorways to glimpse these four protagonists, and this formation and the performance’s apparent lack of self-reflexivity really brought out Beirut’s community-center feel.

The third performance was Hamadeh’s, which seemed much more self-aware and perhaps even humorous. At points she wore sunglasses and paused to stare down the audience, at other times referred to herself in the third person, and at one quite climactic point took the hands of Beirut co-director Jens Meier-Rothe and had the two of them use each other as leverage to go round in circles, getting dizzy and sweaty and almost out of control while she tried to continue her lecture.

But mostly sitting at her prop, her cabinet of curiosities, she used pictures of Muammar Gadhafi and Bashar Al-Assad wearing sunglasses, a prison for immigrants in the Netherlands, a hygiene school in Algeria, the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, and a Lebanese Palestinian refugee camp called Al-Karantina (also known as “the slaughterhouse”) to talk about how she prefers using the word contagion to the word resistance. She connected the government-appointed quack doctors during the plague in ancient Athens to the current Arab uprisings via Nazism and the story of Sun Ra literalizing African-Americans’ alienness by going into outer space through jazz music and destroying or provincializing Earth in the process.

Difficult to follow as it was at times, Hamadeh’s performance, commissioned for the show, somehow tied the whole ambitious exhibition together with its jumble of references and anecdotes about belief, doubt, theater, health, criminology and revolution. Her idea of the state, she said at the end, is the inflexible state of affairs, immunized, fortified, and closed to contagion.

WWI epic arises out of dirt and creativity

Amany Aly Shawky — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:52:00 +0000

As part of the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF), Dutch theater company Hotel Modern, along with composer Arthur Sauer, gave their first performance of “The Great War” in the Arab world on Tuesday night at the AUC Falaki Theater.

“The Great War,” a miniature film set installed and projected live on stage, is absolute perfection; one of the best plays I have seen in years.

The one-hour show starts with what appears to be a friendly gathering between old war veterans, then performers Pauline Kalker and Herman Helle take us back to the beginning of World War I. As audiences, we witness the entire making of the war.

The vivid projections of the gory battles fields, scattered limbs, rotting corpses and burning trees are merely the clever manipulation by Hotel Modern of sawdust, potting soil, rusty nails and parsley. “The soldiers are made of wires and cloth,” the talented performer Arlène Hoornweg told Egypt Independent.

The experience is overwhelming. It is like instantaneously watching a movie production on stage with material from a backyard. It is grand.

The play is told through the words of a soldier who writes to his mother from the Western Front. The journey is intense and the deep and moving voiceover forcefully takes the audience from a light stroll along the front into a heartless and bloody battle happening all inside a box of soil and sand. All the images taken during the performance are projected live using a mixer.

In “The Great War” everything is put to good use, from the padded wire soldiers to the high tech mini cameras, projector and mixer. The sound of Sauer’s own breath is even magnified using a microphone to become crude winds and screams of hungry vultures hovering over the decaying cadavers of soldiers. The end result is an onstage soundtrack produced simultaneously with the picture.

The 15-year old Hotel Modern Company has been touring the world for the last decade with a play that every single audience member can relate to in some way or another. The topic of WWI is big and offers an array of possible snippets; battlefields ooze with imagery, machines, colors, people and emotion which make this ingenious production a success on all levels.

On many occasions, audience members lose the sense between a parsley leaf and a burning tree, the bottom of a mop and a thick bush, a tiny iron soldier and an aching human bleeding to death. You lose all sense of what is real and what is miniature. Bit by bit the hand that is moving the soldier and the wire holding a flying bird gradually fade and the reality and pain of war sink in.

Creativity drives each move or sound performed on the stage of “The Great War.” The performers’ ability to project reality onto their audience is imposing and in many cases heartbreaking. Lighting is the big performer among all with its magical ability to trick and transform a small fish tank into a vast sea and to differentiate day from night, sun from moon, land from sea and dirt from mud. The live soundtrack is also moving and gives a sense of depth and reality. Sauer succeeds in even duplicating the noise of a pair of shoes sinking in mud.

At the end of a glorious performance, the audience is invited to come on stage and inspect the material used during the show closely.

You can catch the last night of the performance on 17 April at 8pm at the AUC Falaki Theater: 24 Falaki Street, off Mahmoud Basiony Street, downtown, Cairo.

'My Nineties' art project presents Egyptian TV through our collective memory

Andeel,Jenifer Evans — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:09:00 +0000

Nostalgia is such a confusing feeling. You listen to a sweet song and it makes you feel bad because it reminds you of your ex, or you love a tasteless unhealthy meal because it reminds you of your mother’s cooking and being a child.

“My Nineties: A Panorama of Collective Memory Televised,” which consists of a documentary film, a book, a live audio-visual performance, a Facebook group, and a video installation at the Townhouse Gallery, cracks open a treasure trove of common feelings shared by the hundreds of young people who attended its opening. It achieves this by playing the nostalgia card, while also making some rather more thought-provoking moves.

The on-going video installation, as well as the documentary and the performance, rely on a number of VHS tapes recorded in the 1990s. They are selected from a vast collection gathered by the artist Mohamed Allam, the “My Nineties” project manager. The weird fashion styles, musical trends, and tricks of TV directors of that period are very strongly present, alongside a subtle political and cultural analysis of an era that grew ancient very suddenly.

If you were a child in Egypt in the nineties, you most likely spent a lot of time watching TV, the very same kind of TV that almost all of your neighbors, schoolmates and relatives were watching. It was a time of poverty, depression, and confusion. People wanted to stay at home and watch something, but there weren’t many options. Two main channels addressed the 60 million people living in the country, and they were funded by government money and heavily monitored by its officials.

Watching TV at that time was very similar to being spoken to by a parent. There was a lot of being told off, and a lot of lies. It was pretty clear that TV wanted people to do one thing – stay quiet – and there was one thing it wanted people not to do – join the Muslim Brotherhood. Obviously it wasn’t a very successful mission.

These previously vague notions crystallized as Andeel watched the craziness of what was on TV at that time in “My Nineties.” In the pleasantly simple video installation there are nine old TV sets scattered around four rooms connected to old VHS players. On one of them, of course, is a long TV interview with the long-ruling former President Hosni Mubarak. The TV showing Mubarak is the biggest, without any seating in front of it, and it is in the first and largest room you enter. It reminded Andeel why he hated Mubarak that much before he was turned by revolution into that monster: the man was incredibly boring.

Mubarak’s absolute absence and the uniform, fixed way in which he is spoken about since the 25 January uprising has mythologized the story a bit. Watching him talking is very real and orientating. It helps understand the present and why we are here.

Other TV sets were showing bits of variety programs, a football game, sections of a soap opera, and loads of music videos that made Andeel feel like there’s a specific job that somebody should be paid to do making sure that things will not look that ridiculous only 20 years later. The madness of TV commercials’ decadent, hypnotizing efforts to convince people to buy this cleaning product or that chocolate bar clearly show that the country was being pushed toward a deformed capitalist model after decades of deformed socialism.

The tapes were presumably recorded by various kinds of people, and some tapes were clearly recorded over several times, resulting in unlikely montages. Why on earth someone would want to record these things is a question that pops up repeatedly.

The documentary, by Emad Maher, is both hilarious and illuminating. It features a director, an actor, a cameramen, and a sound engineer talking about Egyptian TV in the nineties. Mubarak again is a constant, central presence: his pumping increasing amounts of money into TV productions, perhaps in part due to his famous love of TV stars; his tactic of allowing just a little bit of opposition; the superficial, flashy modernization that went on in the country, which left the population shocked and entertained but otherwise untouched.

The book, designed by Adham Bakry to look exactly like a rather worn VHS tape, features informative text by journalist Hassan al-Halougy alongside fuzzy screenshots of TV stars. The author quotes academic studies, articles and interviews alongside his own commentary to create a detailed narrative of what TV was like at the time, how it was made, and what people thought of it.

In Mohamed Allam and Rami Abadir’s 30-minute performance on the exhibition’s opening night, they mixed music made now with a projection of video material from the nineties, using two VHS players and an old nineties analog mixer. Clips dug triangular shapes into each other and rotated in a goofy way. Dramatic scenes from soap operas were slammed into verses of pop hits, jingles from TV ads merged with TV presenters’ dresses and hairstyles. It seemed that with every cut and every mix the audience cheered with joy and excitement. It was obvious that they were reminded of lovely moments when they were small and worry-free. Jolly songs and playfulness are as comforting as bad makeup and ugly dresses. Milk boiling over in a commercial for a cooker made people laugh as much as Mubarak talking about Egypt’s problems with his voice made into a high-pitched squeal.