The Arab Atelier for Culture and Arts, headed by the art critic Hisham Qandil, is organizing two exhibitions for artists Hisham Nawar and Dr. Sami Al-Balshy on Sunday evening, November 10, at the Zamalek Gallery.
The two exhibitions will continue for three weeks. The first exhibition by artist Hisham Nawar is titled “Sleeping Beauties”, and the second exhibition by Dr. Sami Al-Balshy is titled “Instinct”.
Artist Hisham Nawar has participated in many local and international exhibitions, most notably the Cairo International Biennale, the Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries, the Muscat International Biennale, the General Exhibition and the Youth Salon. He has won important awards, including the Grand Prize of the Youth Salon and the Third Prize of the same salon for more than one session, and the Honorary Prize of the Muscat Biennale. Artist Hisham Nawar has held more than one exhibition during his career.
As for the artist Sami Al-Balshy, he participated in many international and local exhibitions and events, won important awards, held more than one solo exhibition, worked as a journalist and critic in many newspapers, was deputy editor-in-chief of the Radio and Television Magazine, and has important critical studies on the Egyptian art movement.
About Hisham Nawar's experience, the writer and novelist Mai Al-Telmissani says: In his current exhibition, Hisham Nawar reaches a threshold of art that he was able to step over with great diligence and determination over years of work. I was personally a faithful witness and celebrated it and the experience it produced, since he drew "The Kiss" to become the cover of a novel published for me in 2012, through our discussion about the vocabulary of love among Arabs and the difference between types of love, longing, passion and infatuation, and how they can be expressed visually, arriving at the sleeping beauties in their current manifestations. In addition to many paths that the artist tried to enter and turned away from without regret in search of his precious jewel and to complete what he started in his extended and diverse artistic project from the beginning.
Al-Telmissany points out: In his previous sculptural and photographic works, Hisham Nawar presented a contemporary vision of the heritage of ancient Egyptian arts and its prominent manifestations in the arts of sculpture, whether in statues or in the sculpture of murals. He was never restricted to it in a folkloric manner, but rather opened an extensive dialogue with it in an attempt to interrogate this heritage and transcend it, establishing for himself a path of his own and an unmistakable imprint. This path combines an abundant culture and authentic knowledge of the various trends of art and experimentation in Europe with an insight into the Egyptian visual arts movement in sculpture and photography since the generation of pioneers, through the experiences of the surrealists and the contemporary art group, up to the present moment. Thus, this exhibition comes in its first manifestation as a tribute to the body and spirit of art, and in its second manifestation as a tribute to Kawabata, one of the great classical writers. Al-Telmissany continues: A celebration of one of the most beautiful novels of the twentieth century, as we see from the title of the exhibition and its general theme. But in depth, it comes to present a perspective different from what contemporary visual arts have been accustomed to presenting. This perspective combines the entrenchment of drawing with its traditions and schools known in ancient and modern times, and the ambition to adopt a vanguard vision that rebels against the limitations and expectations of the art market, by returning to the legacies of ancient Egyptian art and global art trends without a desire to reproduce any of them. In this context, Hisham Nawar's sleeping beauties appear as if they are dreaming of Kawabata's beauties. But Nawar translates the literary body into a visual body, a naked body like the bodies of Kawabata's beauties, which does not easily give itself to the gaze, and almost hides its own eroticism away from the eyes of eavesdroppers, just as the novel's hero is forbidden from touching sleeping girls. The old hero "Eguchi" disappears, along with other characters in the novel, from the visual scene presented by Hisham Nawar. Perhaps because Nawar chose to restore consideration to the silent female characters in the literary work, and to grant them the ability to narrate through the sensual and formative manifestations of the body. Perhaps because Noir sees himself as the artistic equivalent of the old man "Iguchi" who visits the house of sleeping beauties only to spend a night next to one of them. In any case, the artist gives the fictional body a different life, and puts it in the spotlight, freeing it from the obsessions of death.
Artist and critic Sami Al-Balshy talks about his experience in his exhibition "Instinct", saying: My works dealt with forms of life when instincts were able to triumph over the distortions of history, so intimate relationships appeared in their natural form between men and women, especially in rural and poor societies, and I followed the changes and clashes between instinct and history, so I became involved with them intellectually and psychologically for a long time.
There is no doubt that my involvement in interacting with art during my career from this intellectual perspective may push the viewer of my works to raise many questions due to the deliberate distortions in proportions and form, and their reliance on satirical fantasy as a way to present my ideas and aesthetic solutions in the work. But the viewer or recipient will realize that I am fighting with the woman in her battle, in which she was always a victim of the transition from instinct to history, as she was always in the line of fire, facing once and escaping many times. Whenever instinct triumphed over history, she achieved safety and happiness, and whenever the opposite happened, transformation or escape occurred. Al-Balshy adds: I do not address issues except when I see their scenes in my imagination as moving paintings, only then do I begin to implement what I saw, and when I finish observing what I saw, I stop, until my imagination presents another vision of scenes in another topic. Then I turn to the new, but in this experience I experienced paintings brewing inside me and dancing in front of me, inciting me to address an issue that I addressed and presented before in two previous exhibitions, the first entitled “The Harvest” and the second entitled “The Trap”, and what you see today is what I saw of paintings in my imagination, which is a legitimate son of instinct, and I implemented them inspired by our painful reality with a degree of fantasy, symbolism, and exaggeration sometimes, and with my own philosophy. You realize with me the striking contradiction between two human conditions due to the conflict of instinct with history on the ground and in human relations and the results of this conflict when one of them triumphs over the other. Al-Balshy concludes: I do not reduce the conflict between a village safe in its instinct, and a city rising to its history, for the matter is not that simple after matters have become intertwined and entangled in the age of fluidity that no longer gives us an opportunity other than art to reveal the contradictions and invent ways to deal with them in this distorted presence of the conflict between the brilliance of intelligent instinct, and the distortions of history.
