INTERVIEW WITH ABRAAJ CAPITAL ART PRIZE 2010 WINNING ARTIST, HALA ELKOUSSY

Hala Elkoussy ,On red nails, palm trees and other icons,
al-archief, take 2, 2007-2009, Installation of framed
photographs, videos, furniture, curtains, etc.
Installation photograph by Plamen Galabov
- Courtesy of Sharjah Biennial

Hala Elkoussy was born in Cairo in 1974. She studied at the American University before completing an MA in Image and Communication at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She lectured on photography in 2002-2003. In 2004, she co-founded the Contemporary Image Collective, an artist-run initiative dedicated to the visual image, based in Cairo. In 2006, she completed a two year residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, which is where she had met curator Jelle Bouwhuis in 2005.

Bouwhuis curated a solo show with Elkoussy at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam in 2006, entitled Peripheral (and other) stories. Recently, Elkoussy’s work was exhibited in Goteborg Konsthall, Sweden, the 9th Sharjah Biennial, Kunsternes Hus, Oslo, The Townhouse Gallery, Cairo and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Elkoussy’s work delves into the intimate and overlooked sides of communal living to highlight underlying dynamics at play within the complex urban structure that is Cairo.

Laura Trelford (LT): Your work is firmly embedded in the city of Cairo. What does the city give to you as an artist?

Hala Elkoussy (HE): I am born and bred in Cairo. I consider myself Cairene before I consider myself Egyptian. In the colloquial dialect of Egypt, Cairo is equated with Egypt, so the word for Cairo rather than being Al Qahira is simply referred to as Masr (the colloquial name for the country as a whole). At 18, when I first started with photography, the medium became my license to discover the city and its people, beyond the limited experience of school and family. I roamed the streets and explored different neighbourhoods and ways of living.  This has shaped my understanding of my place in society, the various dynamics of communal living and the mechanisms of coping with the harsh realities of the city. As such, I cannot qualify what Cairo brings to me as an artist, because it cannot be separated from what it brings me as an individual.

LT: In your work I sense nostalgia for the past, a desire to maintain traditions and an obligation to preserve or at least archive history – and yet conversely a fascination with all things new, modern and transient, with media and pop culture influencing your practice. Would you agree that you are pulled in these opposing directions, or do you see them working together?

HA: I cannot say that my work is about one or the other. I try to reflect my experience and in my experience the past and the present co-exist, with a tension that is unavoidable, especially in a city like Cairo with a very complex relationship to the past and quite a heterogeneous experience of the present. I am currently working on a short film about a young man who discovers that stories are dying so he sets out to save them. In the script are the following lines:

In the morning he realizes that he is no hero.
In his past lie the roots to his future.

Like the main character, I feel that one cannot cleanly separate the past from what is happening now and that at best what one can do is bring them together in a space where they can exist to expose the sources of tension, and reconcile them as being part and parcel of one another.

LT: How accurate is your documentation? Is it a personal reflection or based on clearly recognisable and acknowledged historical sources? Is individual experience key?

HA: I am an artist and as such personal experience is key. I rely on my work in research, but with the freedom of the artist. So my work, while deeply rooted in fact, does not carry claims to accuracy. In a sense, my photographs and video works are documents in as much as they use media that are connected to documentation; however, the lines between fact and fiction are blurred and forms are used with liberty, so what appears to be documentary can be fiction and vice-versa. I rely on newspaper accounts, interviews and travelogues, but I equally rely on word of mouth, film and literature.  History can be read as a work of literature and it is only through the presence of multiple versions of events, that one can individually reach his/ her own reading of a certain event, and I compile my own version of certain events or incidents. When I make a work entitled the archive, I am not implying that it functions as such in the conventional sense, but more that I am personalising the idea of the archive. Anyone can have an archive and the function of the archive can be purely individual.

LT: Tell me about ‘the history of forgetting’, a phrase coined by cultural critic Norman Klein.

Hala Elkoussy, On Rooftops and Other Points of View,
Candyfloss Stories, 3 Channel Video Installation,
Production Still Copyright Hala Elkoussy

HA: This is what curator Jelle Bouwhuis came up with when writing about my project for ACAP. Klein refers to the fact that places in history will be forgotten because other histories come to lie on top of them. What's especially unique in his work is that he describes this process not as a series of official, political and/or academic forces but as one coming "from below", from what people make up and mythologise upon, drawn from street talk, gossip, Hollywood films and especially one's personal recollections. The History of Forgetting is actually the title of one of his publications from 1997, which applies this type of thinking on Chinatown in Los Angeles: formerly a dense living quarter, now a no-go area of concrete, roads, a museum and the Disney Concert Hall.

LT: Do you feel your installations follow a clear narrative structure or are fragmentary in feel?

HA: I think in my work there is always a narrative. In essence, my work is concerned with carrying forward stories. However, I am aware of the power of clearly spelt out narratives in excluding other possibilities of viewing a certain incident or a certain event. I try in my work to relay the dynamics of the city that appear quite chaotic, quite unplanned, but that are inherently structured, except that the structure is in a constant state of flux. I mirror the experience of "excess" in urban living and use it as a means to generate new meanings and uncovering the hidden structures, the order established by the citizen as opposed to the order enforced from above.

LT: How did spending time away from Cairo - for example in London when you were studying at Goldsmiths and in Amsterdam during your residency – give you distance and a new perspective on your home city?

HA: The first time I stayed away from Cairo for a considerable amount of time was during my studies in London. This experience I believe was key to my work. I became aware during this one year that I cannot separate my practice between work that is about myself and work that is about the "other", but that in essence, this line does not really exist and that when I look at the world outside of myself, I am merely searching for a reflection of my own experience. In London, I made a series of short performative videos in which I used myself as the sole protagonist and questioned issues related to belonging and participation. Shortly after London, I produced a series of photographs entitled (re) construction in which I used the city and its people as a means to portray a certain state of suspension, confusion, a mix between hope and despair that I felt and that I believed I shared with my "post-peace" generation.

Now that I live between Cairo and Amsterdam, Amsterdam gives me the mental space to reflect, something that I find increasingly difficult in Cairo. So it is not so much a new perspective that I have now, but more the distance necessarily to reflect.

LT: What are your impressions of Dubai as a fast growing metropolis?

HA: Dubai stands in sharp contrast to Cairo that grew over hundreds of years, with a mix of the planned and the organic that is not necessarily determinable; but also to other urban centres around the world that could be viewed as more structured than Cairo. My experience of Dubai is really short and as such superficial and so I find it hard to say more about it than it is quite "different".


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