Land of the Hyperreal: the New Egyptian Hybrid Vernacular.
Comisariada por el artista Egipcio Khaled Hafez, se inauguro en el dia de ayer en el Memorial Jose MArti, en la Habana.
Land of the Hyperreal: the New Egyptian Hybrid Vernacular
In the 90s in Egypt, an artistic vernacular style was defined by urban artists that attempted to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western mores and values as transmitted by visual culture. Their approaches and techniques used a hybridized version of East-West visual motifs that questioned the underlying assumptions of consumer culture that had arrived with the flood of Western consumption advertising at the same time as it defined its own home grown aesthetics. Many Egyptian contemporary artists lost interest in critical terms that were used to describe the aesthetics of earlier decades where art was regarded and described as “serving the political cause”. During this time such terms included the local, authentic versus the contemporary, or the intellectual versus the aesthetic. Most of those artists –many of whom lead progressive international careers today– tackle more challenging issues, posing questions that are more philosophical and worldly, in practices that involve documentation, experimentation and docu-fiction. In art projects that raise questions without providing answers, the viewer is entangled in a process of self-questioning about values, relations and other less expressed and talked about givens. Numerous art practices in Egypt today utilize photo-documentation techniques to trace new realities, manipulate the images in ways to enhance the visual message.
The project Land of the Hyperreal that we proudly bring to Cuba today is a curated exhibition that proposes works of Egyptian artists who inspire from or use manipulated photography and / or text, questioning along their processes the influence of practicing photo-documentation and advertising techniques on their personal visual production and the effect of such influence on the novel narrative created. The artists were born and educated in Egypt, and currently live and work in Egypt, and all of the selected artists have exhibited internationally in the past decade.
The term hyperreal is borrowed from Jean Baudrillard’s seminal work on Simulation and Simulacra; his reflections of photography and printed media propagated imagery, and his exploration of the real, the authentic, the counterfeit and his proposal of the hyperreal.
Khaled Hafez, MFA*
*Khaled Hafez is a visual artist who is born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963 where he currently lives and works. His works will be shown in the next Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain, October 2010 and were shown in the Dakar Biennale 2004 & 2006, the Singapore Biennale 2006, Sharjah Biennale 2007, Guangzhou Triennale 2008, Thessaloniki Biennale 2009, as well as in the Saatchi Gallery and Tate Modern, UK, MuHKA museum of art, Antwerp, Belgium, the Queens Museum and the New Museum NY, USA, as well as in Centre George Pompidou, Paris, France.
