Autoportrait of three artists after talking until dawn is the title given to a project conceived by Mahmoud Khaled, Stephan Kperl and Sylvia Winkler for their involvement in an annual event - Dar al- Hiwar (House of Encounter) - initiated and hosted by the Goethe-Institute in Cairo. According to the stated objectives of the organizers, Dar al - Hiwar functions as the Geothe-Institut's answer to reductionist categorizations of Self and Other often perpetuated through such events as "conferences, seminars and discussions that try to promote the so-called 'dialogue' between the Islamic countries and the west". As such, they invite selected individuals from both Germany and Egypt to deploy contemporary artistic practices such as performance, computer art and installation in an effort towards less pre-defined processes of self-examination. Without expectations, the artists in question sat down to discuss the possibilities relevant for such an undertaking. They decided to spend eight nights together in different locations across the sprawling metropolis that is contemporary Cairo. As far as they were concerned, their conversations could have taken place anywhere in the world. It could very well have been a rooftop in Istanbul, a cultural centre in Bombay or a hotel room in Sydney. The locations they chose were completely contingent upon circumstance, dictated by plausible options available to three individual foreigners in an immense city. As soon as darkness gives way to the morning light, each would go their separate ways, only to meet again the following evening for the beginning of yet another session. Their exchange is framed by the existing limitations, their physical and mental capacities, their relationship to one another, and inevitably, to the space they occupy. Undoubtedly, the decision to stay up all night repeatedly was deliberate: not only to simulate a bubble of solitude (where the persistent impositions of modern society are removed) but by consciously inverting the normative cycle of sleep, the body, deprived of rest, tends to suffer from fatigue and physical exhaustion. This in turn influences the faculties of perception, reflection and communication. Each experiences fluctuating states of heightened and diminished consciousness, interjected by the occasional rush of adrenalin; steaming coffee in a paper cup - a brisk walk through the emptiness of a sleeping city - the perfect articulation of an elusive thought, if only to vanish into the abyss of memory seconds later. A sequence of blown up photographic images of the three artists taken at the break of dawn mark the end of each of their sessions. The images are qualified by the presence of the accompanying text, thereby setting the parameters of their meanders, both to them and to the viewer. This set of coordinates identifies the duration of time they spent together, the date and the location, along with a compound statement - a title of sorts - referring to the subject that dominated their conversations during that night. The combination of visuals and text, seemingly mundane, perhaps even self-absorbed, remain as a material memento of the open-ended performance they alone witnessed and enacted. Their role is to engage with each other in an open-ended discourse, without conscious restrictions on the direction of their discussion. Yet the very notion of coming up with one single title that aptly encapsulates the meanderings of their conversation entails retroactively imposing (and confronting) a recognizable order on the chaotic flow of sound bites that had occurred between the three parties. It entails identifying an outline of what three different individuals agree upon as the crux of their nightly ruminations by collectively revisiting their recent past. In presenting us the outlines of their nocturnal encounters, they invite us to rethink their thoughts, to re-imagine what their sessions, both self-indulgent and austere, might have brought to the surface. Moreover, what they end up with, or rather what we as spectators end up seeing, is a serialized voyeuristic account of intimate affair between three different individuals in a strange place. An account that exists as testament to the presence of a human capacity to dissect, to debate, to withstand, to contemplate, to remember and to share
Aleya Hamza, Cairo, 2004
>>arabic version
