Cultivating History
Amina Mansour:  A Work in Progress
By Kerstin Zurbrigg
 
Originally printed in Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, Spring/Summer 2001
Reprinted here with permission.
 
Alexandria based artist, Amina Mansour, is a member of a new generation of artists working within Egypt and within a context which both fuels and problematizes a critical position.  In her recent work, Mansour has painstakenly fabricated a series of botanical shapes from a material rife with poetic and historic associations.  It is this material, cotton, “pure Egyptian cotton,” which becomes the metaphor and the means for the construction of a private fantasy.  For Mansour, the process itself takes on a manifest role, as the project is ongoing; a continual work in progress with a suspended fantasy world of its own.  The ephemeral substance of the cotton acts as a bridge, linking two vastly different cultures:  Egypt and the United States.  Mansour asks us to imagine, and to participate in this project, or rather this fantasy, in which two very disparate images of the U.S. and Egypt are placed one on top of the other.  The space, which Mansour wishes to trace, is that of the aristocratic families in both the U.S., and in Egypt.  It is particularly the social constructions of the deep south of the United States, and the Egyptian city of Alexandria that interest her.  It is also their histories that are symbolically represented in the nearly tragic stasis of her sculptures and installations.  In contradiction to this seeming incoherence, Mansour attempts to locate a moment of clarity, a moment of belief, however precariously suspended it may be, through a connection.  This is a make-believe world, after all, as the flowers are fabricated.  Yet, underneath their fictive exteriors lies a haunting recollection; and the hint of a story, that retains a position which is at once believable, and yet, ultimately questionable.

Amina Mansour is one of a new generation of visual artists whose work is actively challenging previous modes of representation within Egyptian culture.  In recent years, certain younger Egyptian artists have begun to produce works which tackle social and political themes, albeit in subtle and discrete ways.  Their role has become multi-fold, as they attempt to rise to the challenge of the lack of available information, and its consequences; a theme that has been part of the Egyptian cultural discourse in recent years.  They are not only working to find a more visible voice in the international community, but are also working towards creating an audience for their work within Egypt.  In this struggle, Egyptian artists of the new generation are taking on issues of cultural identity, in ways that transgress the strategies often used to address this discourse.  In addition, their projects are beginning to dislodge the previous glorification of, and unquestioned identification with, archaic, pharonic iconography.

Mansour’s recent sculpture capitalizes on the eclectic overlapping of two cultures, and reaches into a more personal research into remembrances, and speculations about the social situations within these cultures.  This is a project born out of necessity, to some extent, as Mansour herself attempts to discover a place for identification with the histories of the two cultures into which she herself was born.  Although this projects invites an involvement with a kind of open intimacy, the work itself does not expose this autobiography in obvious ways.  Mansour’s work does not function as a social critique, but rather it involves a reevaluation of two particular constructions:  the construction of a separate elite class; and the constructed, historic portrayal of the position of women within this elite class. The floral designs presented within the utilitarian plexi box cases seem very much to do with the need to preserve a fragile condition; reflecting the position of the wealthy sector within their respective cultures and, in particular, they allude to the historical construction of the position of women within the two cultural milieus (passive, controlled, objectified.).

Mansour’s configurations are exhibited on Styrofoam surfaces, which disturb the seamlessness and fragility of the cotton, and yet complete an essential symbolic reading.  The boxes reinforce a dialogue with the past; to a position of fragility necessarily guarded and protected through extreme measures of social isolation.  Once again, it is the material substance of cotton that suggests a connection by evoking two troubling yet similar histories:  the history of cotton production.  In the U.S., this history reflects a painful and violent era, once of displacement and struggle – survival and intervention.  In Egypt, this history includes enormous wealth and isolation through financial segregation, a period which met a sharp conclusion, as wealth was confiscated, and the monarchy disbanded after the 1953 revolution led by Gamal Abdul Nasser.  The tenuous construction and location of power, and the necessity for its protection, is echoed in Mansour’s enclosed and fragile botanical forms.

In both cultures, an abrupt end to the social institutions that produced the immense private wealth, left the artifacts of an often-romanticized history.  It is exactly this nostalgia, and the fantasy behind the façade, which Mansour traces with a delicate hand.  The very tone, which she employs, suggests a complicated position.  It is the edge of delicacy in the work, which transcends itself, and reveals a more calculated and controlled position.  Mansour is revisiting the memory of a particular time through her actions, and through the evocation of a specific tempo.  She places us in a position close to her own – in between criticism, and a longing for identification.  What is our part in the construction of this history?  How does one negotiate an identity to a fragile and nostalgic construction?  Mansour’s position is both ambiguous and ambivalent.

It is clear that Mansour’s floral constructions represent more than a simple aesthetic exercise.  The strange and beautiful renditions become representations of the passage of time.  The work reflects the actions/pastimes of another era without dogmatic narration.  The domestic arts of both flower arranging, and embroidering, are at once present in Mansour’s designs.  The hands behind these new artifacts are not passive, or dimunitive.  Despite the commonly held prejudice against the decorative arts, Mansour manages to re-use these structures in a direct challenge to the historical representations of an era.  The artist’s presence in the work (the sense of her hands, the sense of her making) seems to re-invent the ways in which we continue to identify and represent patriarchal culture.  The flowers, and their maker, act as an insistent reminder of the presence of a history that has been over determined.  Her reconstructions of the past, and nostalgic evocation of a lost epoch through a re-enactment of their specific pastimes, bring this experience into the present moment, and allow for an examination of the conventions of historic construction.

Oddly enough, it is the taste for French furniture of the Louis 15th style that is another shared history of these two places, Egypt and the U.S.  A walk through the furniture-making district of Cairo today reveals the still lingering taste for the ornate.  These same models, and their allusions to a more decadent lifestyle, can be easily found in the older estate homes in the Southern states of the U.S., and in particular in the ante-bellum house which Mansour alludes to in her re-constructed furniture design.  Mansour acknowledged this shared cultural desire for the decorative, and what that may represent, in her recent exhibition at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo[1].  Mansour exhibited her latest work, an intricately reproduced carved vitrine, complete with a hand painted porcelain plaque depicting an ante-bellum house of the U.S. South.  It is this elaborately constructed vitrine which exposes the shared agricultural history of two nations and bears a strange cultural collision in its matrix.  Names of the wealthy, and once culturally diverse Egyptian families are listed on a plaque, and recount a time in Alexandria before the revolution which, although not wholly utopic, did support a more ethnically diverse community.  The vitrine functions as a centerpiece for the presentation of a beguiling assortment of textual and pictorial elements which, despite familiarity, and association to a kind of lavishly produced vanity, draws attention to itself through it’s strangely disparate elements.  At a distance, the work, installed in the gallery space almost looks like a found object.  An object not altogether out of context in the newly acquired, and as yet un-renovated upper floor of the Townhouse Gallery.  On close inspection though, the present components of carved claw feet, painted porcelain and cotton floral arrangement, we realize the complexity of the presented symbolic elements.

Nostalgia is clearly an essential ingredient to Mansour’s work, and comes into play strongly in her recent installation.  The recognition that the nostalgic constructions are hollow static signs does not produce a new challenge.  Rather, the suggestion that perhaps nostalgia is somehow necessary, or desired, presents a conflict.  This longing produces an anxiety, as it becomes difficult to overlook or critique a desire.  Susan Stewart writes in her book, On Longing, that nostalgia is the desire to desire[2].  It might be interesting to read Mansour’s re-workings of nostalgia as a strangely, quiet crisis – repeating a longing to identify with a discredited history.  The difficulty lies in the act of representing, as even ones own constructions of history lack the multiplicity to sustain identification; as subjectivity is always shifting.  The fact that this created world is manifestly a work in progress promises to address the issue of identification and subjectivity in new terms.  In her project, Mansour suggests a position much like a balancing act:  one must proceed slowly (gently) as one false move may scatter the ephemeral fabric of representation.  The deliberate slow tempo gives it an eerie air, and a lingering (sick) sense that time is passing a little too slowly.

It is no coincidence perhaps that Mansour’s attempts to take on these issues to do with nostalgia coincide with a national revision of the Egyptian Revolution and the Royal Era.  While the Revolution itself remains sacrosanct, the once heavily critiqued Royal Era, the era of King Farouk, which was anathema, is now being revived and revisited in a public display of cultural nostalgia[3].  The sense of tragedy, which is written into the construction of this particular national fairy tale (the monarchy disbanded in 1953), provides the location for a socially shared sense of loss, and creates yet another market in cultural nostalgia.  A strange sense of guilt is experienced in our implicit and shared cultural fantasies, as we continue to find ways to erase the power struggles and romanticize the lives of the wealthy.  In her own work, Mansour slips behind the illusion of nostalgia to evoke not the real or the right history, but allows us to re-read these constructions as just that:  fabrications.     
 
Kerstin Zurbrigg is an American art critic, currently based in Havana, Cuba.
 

[1] Amina Mansour at the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, December 1999, Cairo, Egypt.
[2] Susan Steart, On Longing:  Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1993.
[3] Recent exhibitions of royal portraiture in photography in Cairo (at the American University Sony Gallery, 1998) and the luxurious Salamlek Hotel, wholly devoted to the presentation of actual and reconstructed records from the Egyptian royal family, located beside the former Alexandria summer palace in Montaza.