Egypt
2019, International Encyclopedia of Surrealism
Last updated…
13 pages
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
Abstract
Summary of Surrealist movement in Egypt.
Related papers
Dada/Surrealism, 2013
H-AMCA book review of Sam Bardaouil's 'Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group'
Continued neglect for the heritage of the Egyptian Surrealist movement, despite a resurgence in interest abroad, raises questions about the politics of culture in Egypt. This article was originally published in Akhbar Al-Adab and was translated to English for the Cairo Review of Global Affairs.
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2010
The question of modernity in the radical sense of the word, in its wish for the rejection of the past, creation of a clear distinction between nature and science, and focus on individual freedom, seems to be of major interest to the Egyptian intellectual milieu in the late 1930s and the 1940s. One of the important artists of the time and a founding member of the newly created Egyptian surrealist group Art et Liberté, Ramsis Younan, set up with transparent language the whole staging platform, so to speak, for the modern debate in the postcolonial Egyptian context. In a 1956 article, he argues:
Routledge Companion to Surrealism, 2022
"Wonderful Things":Surrealism and Egypt
If we consider André Breton's long-lasting interest in the renewing powers of the human mind, as released by magic and in particular by magic art, Georges Henein, who introduced surrealism to Egypt, represents the ideal mediator with the Orient, and with ancient Egypt in particular. Several other Egyptian authors and artists could be said to share this mediating role, such as Ramsès Younane, but also Angelo de Riz, whom Henein rated highly in his 1937 "Bilan du mouvement surréaliste" ("Appraisal of the surrealist movement"): "Les récits de rêves tiennent une place considérable dans le poème et surtout dans la peinture surréalistes. Parmi les tableaux exposés ici même par Angelo de Riz, plusieurs ne sont que des instantanés de rêves […] De nombreuses toiles de Salvador Dalí ou d'Yves Tanguy paraissent autant de rêves pris sur le fait" (Henein OEuvres 371). ("Dream narratives are very important in surrealist poetry and especially painting. Among the pictures shown here by Angelo de Riz, several are just sketches from dreams [...]. Many paintings by Dalí or Yves Tanguy appear as so many dreams caught on the spot.") It is easy to associate Parisian surrealism with that of Cairo, in its most open, cosmopolitan dimension. Indeed, Cairo is often called "le Petit Paris". Among the writers, one should also mention first Edmond Jabès, Marie Cavadia and the now famous Joyce Mansour, who published her first poems while she was still living in Cairo with the help of Georges Henein, Gérald Messadié, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues, who visited Egypt in the 1950s. Despite these examples, the connection between the Parisian and Egyptian surrealist worlds was not very strong, and it depended on a few artists or writers, like Georges Henein and Ramsès Younane, or Fouad Kamel (Fall 101-105). The modern painting movement born in Egypt, however, is surrealist in its most accomplished part and has strong affinities with European surrealism, as reflected in the Egyptian sensitivity to daily magic, such as that found in the works of Abdel Hadi Al Gazzar. However, despite these evident relations, a question arises as to what exactly Breton's attitude toward Egypt was. When Henein presented the
Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is the culmination of six years of research, initiated by guest curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. On display is a comprehensive exhibition about the Egyptian Art and Liberty group (A&L) – an eclectic group of artists, writers and intellectuals prominent in the 1930s and 1940s. Amina Diab reviews this exhibition, which brings together almost 300 artefacts relating to the group's work.
MAVCOR Journal, 2020
Tweet Tweet 4 0 Share Art and cultural production in Egypt during much of the last hundred years has operated against a backdrop of political crisis and confrontation. In this book Patrick Kane focuses on the turbulent changes of the 1920s to 1960s, when polemical discourse and artistic practice developed against the entrenched and co-opted conservatism of elite and state culture. This entry was posted in Africa and the Middle East, Arts and Literature, IB Tauris, Politics, Susheel Gokarakonda and tagged Arab Spring, art, Egypt, history, literature, Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, politics, revolutions. Bookmark the permalink.
Short Film Studies, 2024
Cairo has been described as a city of dualities, in the sense of its conflict between the traditions of the past and the modern values of the present. The city has witnessed rapid transformations in terms of its sociocultural aspects due to political, economic and religious changes. In his work, the acclaimed and legendary Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine portrayed such changes in his 1991 short semi-documentary Al-Qahira Munawwara bi Ahlaha (Cairo as Told by Youssef Chahine) in surrealistic and flâneurie ways. This article breaks down Chahine's visual interpretation of Cairo to reveal his sense of in-betweenness as a form of urban surrealism. The film offers fragmented episodes of Cairo that are assembled to reflect Chahine's imagination and collective memory. In filming Cairo, Chahine transformed his portrait of the city into a self-reflexive illustration of a filmmaker who expresses deep admiration for Cairo and its inhabitants.

Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Related papers
Archiv Orientalni, 2005
LSE Review of Books, 2017
In Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group, Sam Bardaouil provides the first comprehensive account of the Egypt-based Surrealist collective's artworks, literary texts and critical writings. This is an innovative analysis that invites us to reconsider existing definitions and understandings of the Surrealist movement, balancing detailed historical inquiry with provocative theoretical questioning, writes Johannes Makar.
Less than a month apart, two independent exhibitions recently opened to commemorate an important chapter of Egyptian Modernism and the achievements of a Cairo-based group of young rebels calling themselves Art and Liberty. The exhibitions, later traveling separately on different international museum tours from Seoul to Liverpool, are the first substantial surveys on the Egyptian surrealists since 1987 and aim to position avant-garde Egyptian art as part of the narrative of global modernity. As they unveil to the international public thrilling connections with notions of Western surrealism, the breadth of the Cairo exhibition and the depth of the Paris exhibition should help change the paradigm of looking at non-Western surrealist contributors as mere splinters or derivatives.
Third Text, 2021
ASAP/Journal, 2022
research focuses on contemporary Tunisian art within contexts of global contemporary art, contemporary global surrealism studies, Southwest Asia and North Africa studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory. She has published in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies and The London Review of Education and has an article forthcoming in Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. While these three larger eras of the modern Tunisian state are distinct, the state's multiple, interwoven parts constitute a deep entrenchment of authority that suffuses each. Aïcha Filali's Hierarchy (2000) (see fig. 1) and Houda Ghorbel's Pensées Canalisées (Channeled Thoughts, 2016) (see fig. 2) each critique state power by pointing out the realities of the Tunisian state's operations. In Hierarchy, three ceramic heads, one mounted above the next, indicate how individual bodies set in power ASAP/Journal 500 / relationships remain beholden to the state apparatus. Meanwhile, Ghorbel juxtaposes ceramic heads with PVC bodies in parallel to the opposing demands of the Tunisian state and Tunisian social norms on citizens. She indicates that even post-uprising, issues of state authoritarianism still affect Tunisians' autonomy. Her assessment corresponds with a body of scholarship on political repression and dissidence in modern Tunisia, including texts by Mohamed Chamekh, Laryssa Chomiak, Abir Kréfa, and Mohamed-Salah Omri. 2 Filali evaluates the Ben Ali era and Ghorbel the post-uprising moment, indicating that state power cannot be addressed merely through shifts in political power. These Tunisian artists use surrealism through the deployment of the uncanny, illogical bodily configurations, and biomorphic shapes. Such iterations disrupt the boundaries between reality and dream, conscious and subconscious. Yet, it would be a mistake to think of surrealism as wholly concerned with fantasy. Although it often suggests the merger of fantasy and reality, surrealism in fact challenges established reality. Some questioning along this line is found in Tunisian art pioneer Hatim El Mekki's approach to artmaking, which Jean Goujon describes as ceaselessly questioning the world through images. 3 Tunisia can be seen as one such exploitative society where surrealism can help to expose the "pseudo-real" of the state. With its origins typically ascribed to twentieth-century Europe, surrealism may seem an incongruous choice for artists working in contemporary Tunisia. Surrealism, however, was a global ideological movement that equally prized poetry, literature, and visual culture. The Egyptian surrealist group Art and Liberty (1938 to the late 1940s), the Paris-based Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile (founded in the 1970s), and the Chicago Surrealist Group (founded in 1966) are examples of the movement's global scale. In 1939, Kamel Telmisany, a member of Art and Liberty, expressed: "[surrealism] is a movement whose most distinctive feature is the internationalism of its thought and means. Its character is not local or nationalist in any way." 4 Women North African surrealist artists such as Egyptian Inji Efflatoun, another member of the Art and Liberty group, and Algerian Baya Mahieddine also provide a backdrop for the surrealist aspects of " Surrealism. .. was a global ideological movement. . .
Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2018
This special issue brings together the work of scholars from several disciplines (history, art history, archaeology, Egyptology, and literary criticism) in order to address a number of hitherto unexplored aspects of ancient Egypt’s place in nineteenth-century culture. The essays in this special issue consider the ways in which ancient Egyptian civilisation was used as a means of confronting contemporary ideas of history, empire, politics, science, mysticism, religion and psychology, as well as the intersection between Egyptology (as an emerging academic discipline) and Egyptomania (the manifestation of enthusiasm for Egypt—in particular, the country’s ancient past—in the cultural consciousness more broadly). Traversing class and gender boundaries, extending from material to literary culture, and investigating representations of Egypt in a variety of artistic and literary modes, the essays which make up this special issue combine to produce the first truly multidisciplinary study of ...
American Ethnologist, 2008
Reckonings is a fresh and expertly argued study of modernity and modern art in contemporary Egypt. As winner of the 2007 Albert Hourani Prize (awarded by the Middle East Studies Association for the best book in Middle East studies), it invites the close and engaged reading of any anthropologist interested in the Middle East and its national public cultures. The book, however, deserves more than an audience of regional specialists alone. Jessica Winegar has framed her study in a very accessible and appealing way. It makes a splendid contribution to
2019
K. Myśliwiec, K. Pachniak, K. Nabożna, E. Wolny-Abouelwafa (eds.), Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures Polish Academy of Sciences & Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies Faculty of Oriental Studies University of Warsaw, Warsaw 2019.
Alex Dika Seggerman