FATHI HASSAN: CULTURAL NOMAD

Fathi Hassan, a member of the African Diaspora brings his ancestral roots with him wherever his nomadic life takes him.  He was born in Egypt where his family relocated after being displaced by the planned flooding that created the Aswan Dam; however his lineage is Nubian and goes back to generations of warriors, farmers and village chiefs.  Hassan manages to seamlessly blend those ancestral roots with the culture his new home, Italy, another land of ancient heritage. His themes may be primordial but his media and approach are not. Hassan is a highly intelligent and adventurous artist who works in performance, video, photography, and installation, as well as painting and sculpture. His oeuvre is poetic, yet it is also conceptually sophisticated and highly refined.

As an art student in Cairo, Hassan studied the Italian masters, an essential part of the curriculum of the conventional art schools of the Middle East that in those years discouraged experimentation with new ideas and techniques. Conversations about contemporary art were rare and artists in Egypt had little opportunity for growth and career advancement. As I observed when serving as US Commissioner to the Cairo Biennale where I organized an exhibition by Fred Wilson, even in the early 1990s, galleries were virtually non-existent, international art periodicals were difficult to obtain, and most exhibition opportunities were in antique stores. Artists themselves were often unaware of the wider art world. They could relate to and appreciate that Wilson was an African American but many were shocked, even outraged at the conceptual nature of his installation.

Fortunately things have changed due to global communications, the Internet, publications such as Bidoun and NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art and the work of scholars and curators such as Salah Hassan (no relation), Olu Oguibe, Kellie Jones, Okwei Enwezor, and others. Artists everywhere are aware of developments in art around the world and there is an international dialogue and cross-pollination that is beneficial to all.

Until relatively recently artists of non-European heritage, especially those whose ancestry is African or Middle Eastern were ignored by the wider art world. It is still difficult to develop a commercial career outside the cultural centers of Europe and the United States but there are many more exhibition opportunities at home and abroad with the plethora of biennales and other international contemporary art festivals.

By 1988 things had begun to open up when Hassan was chosen by Dan Cameron to participate in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale, one of the first Africans to ever do so. In 1993 Mary Angela Schroth organized the first exhibition in Italy of art from post-Apartheid South Africa, Incroci del Sud/Affinities, at the Sala 1 and the Venice Biennale. The 2001 Biennale featured a major collateral show of seven conceptual artists from Africa, Authentic/Ex-Centric, that laid to rest the terms ‘exotic’ and ‘primitive’ that western critics too often condescendingly associated with that continent.

Now a few artists such as Yinka Shonibare, Tracey Rose, Mona Hatoum, Chris Ofili, Shirin Neshat, David Hammons, Ghada Amer, Adrian Piper, Fred Wilson, and Georges Adeagbo are not only accepted as equals by the mainstream art world but have achieved star status in it. Finally, for the first time Africa will have its own pavilion at the 2007 installment of the Venice Biennale. Despite these changes, these exhibitions and artists are the exception to the Eurocentric rule. Many important artists, especially those whose work does not fit into the art market, remain invisible on the global stage. Hassan’s work is not overtly political but as an artist of the African Diaspora the politics of race and identity are always present. Although Hassan himself has achieved international stature and has exhibited widely, he is well aware of dominance of a white art world when he writes:

One advantage of being black is this:

In most human tales

they hardly notice you.

That way you’re safe from humans

with only God ahead to judge you.

Eternal and One.

Untidy Thought, 2005

Not content to remain in Egypt with its limited opportunities, Hassan left to teach in Baghdad, then a peaceful and cosmopolitan city. Eventually he decided to move to the west and in 1979 chose Italy as his new home, in part because his familiarity with Italian art. Hassan studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Naples where he soon became an integral part of a thriving contemporary art scene that included the avant-garde theater group Falso Movimento with whom he collaborated as an actor and set designer. Now he splits his time between Milan and Fano, a city in the Marche where the Via Flaminio meets the Adriatic. Fano, as well as Italy in general, has long had a connection with the Middle East through war and trade. It is both the site of a Roman defeat of Carthage and the first city in Italy to set up a printing press with Arabic type in 1514.

Bombarded by the ancient art and Catholic iconography of his adopted country, Hassan combined his African spirituality with Italy’s Christian religious imagery to create an art totally his own. His African version of saints, Elham, Maha, and Tawinda resemble their Catholic counterparts but are surrounded by fruit and carry flowers rather than the palms of martyrdom. Sometimes they are naturalistic and seem more warrior queen than virgin. Other times they take on the stylized features of Byzantine icons, Cimabue Madonna’s, and elongated African masks. His angels are not cherubim; they are winged apparitions of the camels and elephants of his homeland. Humans are suckled, not by the wolf of Romulus and Remus, but an African ibex. Hassan’s reliquaries can be boxes, cages, or installations and hold the sacred memories of a nomadic life. The items contained in them such as flutes, bundles, sacks, scarabs, palm leaves, and sand are metaphors for the sounds of Africa, the silence of the desert, the fluidity of time, and the ephemeral nature of memory.

The silence and the mysticism associated with religion in general are key to Hassan’s art, especially those works that are most reductive. His efforts are reminiscent of those of Mark Rothko or especially Barnett Newman who used his Jewish tradition of the ineffable to create his own version of the Stations of the Cross. It is not surprising that the world of the spirit is so important to Hassan. He hails from a part of the world that spawned the three dominant world belief systems, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, as well as that of pharaonic Egypt and the African nature-based religions and they all have had an impact to a greater or lesser degree on his work.

The modern world and the history of western art are equally important to Hassan’s work although he brings his own interpretation to them. He often makes reference to artists such as Francis Picabia, Joseph Beuys, and in particular, Marcel Duchamp who like Hassan was chess master and brilliant conceptual strategist. A photograph of Duchamp looks out at us in Hassan’s 1990 sculpture Conditioned Groove and what looks like bicycle wheel appears in the 1989 assemblage, The Sahara Doesn’t Like Technology, possibly referring to Duchamp’s first Readymade. Like Duchamp, he riffs on the Mona Lisa but instead of playing with gender he makes her African. Hassan refers to the master with a performance work that mimics the famous Man Ray photograph of Duchamp with a star shaved into his hair. Hassan shaved his entire head, emphasizing its dome in reference to likenesses of the pharaohs, placed a star on his cheek (an Islamic symbol and an image that Nubian women sometimes tattoo their cheeks), and titled the work I’m Not Marcel Duchamp, I’m Tutankamon. His use of bird cages, like the ones that are ubiquitous in the markets of Cairo, are filled with objects and are reminiscent of Duchamp’s 1921 piece Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy? and other cages and boxes by Surrealist artists. 

Naples in the 1970s was a fertile place for the avant-garde and many prominent artists came through the city. Fluxus and Arte Povera artists were making time based-work, using humble materials, and embracing the ephemeral. Although Hassan did not move to Naples until 1979 he was stimulated by this new art and exposed to the work of the legendary German artist Joseph Beuys through his friendship with the gallerist Lucio Amelio. Beuys claimed to be a shaman with a special connection to nature and how Hassan, as a young African artist, felt about this white European man’s appropriation of his culture I can’t say. It seems to me though, that he finally took it back for himself with the 1996 performance Sacred Family of Animals. Instead of talking to a dead hare or interacting with coyote he holds a toy elephant, an African animal known for its long memory and a stuffed fox, symbol of the trickster.

Although Hassan’s art is conceptually informed by western art, he makes constant use of imagery from his Nubian background, and in this exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale, he focuses on the most important cities in Nubia, Aswan, Luxor, Abu Simbel, Toshka and Kom Ombo, now part of Egypt, and Wadi Halfa, now in the Sudan.  Nubia, considered by many to be the oldest black civilization, dates back to at least 3100 BC. Once called the Land of Punt (or land of the Gods), it was situated on the trade route between Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa over which such goods as ivory, ebony, incense, animal skins, precious metals and stones were carried. It was usually dominated by the more militarily powerful Egypt except a time of in the Late Dynastic Period when the Kingdom of Kush united the area and the pharaohs were Nubian. Egyptian hegemony continues into modern times when the government flooded the Nile to create the Aswan Dam, displacing thousands of Nubians and destroying much of their homeland.

After our show at the Cairo Biennale opened, Fred Wilson and I traveled south with another artist, Whitfield Lovell, visited the ancient sites, and ended our trip in Aswan. It is the site of the first cataract of the Nile and a city known to Herodotus, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder. We were befriended there by a very generous Nubian nicknamed Boss and spent several days sailing with him in his felucca on what is considered by many to be the most beautiful stretch of the Nile. He took us to the homes of his friends and relatives in the Nubian villages on the Elephantine Island, named for its gray rock formations, where as many as 5,000 relocated Nubians live. Although only minutes away by boat on the East bank of the Nile, the island could be in a totally different and ancient world from the modern city of Aswan. There are no cars or motorbikes so it is quiet and serene, children and animals roam freely through the narrow streets, and everyone knows everyone.

We were accepted as honored visitors and warmly received with food and drink. There we saw many of the motifs and images found in Hassan’s work. Colorful and fantastic plants, birds, crocodiles, fish and other animals, as well as talismans against the Evil Eye, and memories of the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, are painted on the facades of the mud brick houses. Inside these homes can be found many utilitarian and decorative objects made from the date palm leaves that recur in Hassan’s art. Magical human and animal transformations are common. I am reminded of Hassan’s 2002 painting The Nile Bride of an African mermaid or other works in which men have antelope horns or woman turn into leaves. His calligraphic images and warm sandy colors are reminiscent of the henna that is used to decorate the hands of Nubian women for special events and festivals. We heard the mesmerizing sounds of the flute and drums that figure so often in Hassan’s work.

Hassan’s exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale, much of which was done on site, is entitled SAFIR: Each heartbeat has the FACE of my ANCESTORS. In it Hassan takes on the role of Safir, meaning apostle, ambassador, and carrier of letters, bringing sentiments to and from loved ones from far away. His installation, consisting of three chambers, tells a Nubian story, but one like the Nubian oral tradition, that follows no narrative structure with a set beginning and end. Hassan describes the work as a flowing river, an appropriate metaphor since the Nile is such an essential part of Nubian life. But this river, transplanted to Urbino, is one we can only feel, not see. The exhibition consist of one single installation; the first room, the one of mind, contains a huge tent from which spouts aforisms and quotations impressed upon the walls together with photo self-portrait. The second one is the most emotional, it is the room of the heart; then the third room corresponds to the theme of the Nile, representing movement and the life of the nomad. Finally, the third is dedicated to spirituality.

Hassan describes this project of memory in this way:

Try to throw water on hot sand in suffocating heat: even before it hits the ground, it evaporates, leaving no trace, only the Silence of my Ancestors and the Sand.

The exhibition integrates all of Hassan’s identities and cultures. He is a man of the world…a Nubian, modern Egyptian, European by choice, and a sophisticated conceptual artist well versed in art history and current art practice. The installation includes texts, drawings, video, photographs, documentation of past performances using the themes and motifs, undecipherable calligraphy, containers, birds, animals, scarabs, palm leaves, plants, sand, and saints that recur with great sensitivity and poetry throughout Hassan’s oeuvre.

Kathleen Goncharov