{"title":"In Legitimate Defense","authors":"Gerard Aching","doi":"10.1215/10757163-9435793","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-9435793","url":null,"abstract":"In response to demands from French Communist Party officials for surrealists to define the nature of their relationship to communism, André Breton published Legitimate Defense (1926), a pamphlet in which he described surrealism’s ideological and political stance and identified some of the principal debates and challenges that the group faced in Europe. What lie at stake in the surrealists’ effort to encompass metaphysical and dialectical methods are both the legitimacy of their claims on the term revolutionary and their insistence on a revolution of the mind. In this context, the author examines Breton’s concept of the “marvelous” that affirms the feasibility of equilibrium between the work of the mind and political engagement. He compares Breton’s stance to that of a group of Martiniquan students in Paris, who in 1932 published a legitimate defense of their own. Unlike Breton’s pamphlet, the Martiniquan publication wholeheartedly embraced the communist Third International organization and the universal application of Marx’s dialectical materialism, and associated surrealism with a form of human expression rather than with a radical revolution of the mind. Nevertheless, the Martiniquans embrace Marx’s dialectical materialism without questioning why Marx’s scientific explanation of universal history failed to account for the absence of a Black proletariat in Martinique. The author’s comparison between Breton and the Martiniquan texts concludes that the most evident difference between them is the ease with which the Martiniquan students embrace surrealism without sensing any possible contradictions, thereby perceiving ambivalence as a countercultural strategy.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45858006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Art Becomes Liberty","authors":"Salah M. Hassan","doi":"10.1215/10757163-9435625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-9435625","url":null,"abstract":"The 2015 Egyptian Surrealists in Global Perspective conference, and the companion 2016 exhibition When Art Becomes Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists (1938–1965), both held in Cairo, Egypt, explored the history and evolution of the work of Egyptian surrealists and their remarkable legacy within Egypt and in international surrealist circles. This article serves as a preview of contributions to this special issue of Nka, which serves as a followup to these two events, documenting the relationship of the Egyptian surrealists with Western counterparts, especially the French surrealists, and their contributions to internationalism, antifascist global protest, and decolonization, staged and performed outside the West. The artistic and intellectual output of the Egyptian surrealists was primarily centered around activities initiated by the Art and Liberty group (Jama’at al-Fann Wa al-Hurriyyah), the Contemporary Art Group (Jama’at al-Fann al-Mu’asir), and the artists who exhibited with one or both of these groups. In addition to more traditional artistic genres, photography played an important role in the surrealists’ artistic practices of the time, as is examined in this issue. This introduction, and the contributions to this issue of Nka that it surveys, affirm that the Egyptian surrealists, among other non-Western modernists, represent the multifaceted aspects of modernity and its global interconnectedness in the twentieth century. The strength of the Egyptian surrealists lay squarely in their theoretical underpinning that emphasized non-Western modernism, not as derivative or secondary to the Western modernism, but as a unique experiment in modernity that is worthy of its own investigation.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42556270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Georges Henein","authors":"Bachir El Sibaei","doi":"10.1215/10757163-9435695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-9435695","url":null,"abstract":"Georges Henein was an important pioneer of modernism in Egypt, who played a critical role in the cultural and artistic movement of the country, despite critics who tried to distance him from contemporary Egyptian thought under the guise that he was a Francophone writer. This research presents Henein’s contribution to the historical, cultural, and national Egyptian trajectory, using some translated excerpts from his writings. The surrealist adventure Henein launched in Egypt was an important modernizing event in contemporary Egyptian culture. Although the influence of surrealist visions on Arabic literature was limited, the impact of these visions on the Francophone literature in Egypt was significant and evident in the work of poets such as Munīr Hāfez, Walid Munir, Horus Shenouda, Edmond Jabès, Mary Kavadia, and Joyce Mansour. In the field of fine arts, the impact of surrealism produced clear and essential modernist trends that have become characteristic of these arts.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48836929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Kamal Youssef","authors":"Salah M. Hassan","doi":"10.1215/10757163-9435835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-9435835","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42971991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Van-Leo","authors":"Ola Seif","doi":"10.1215/10757163-9435765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-9435765","url":null,"abstract":"When the Art and Liberty group launched its activities in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the young Levon Boyadjian (later to become the famous Van-Leo) and his elder brother, Angelo, were jointly debuting their careers as photographers in Cairo. Van-Leo’s archive of photographic prints, negatives, and documents reveals much about the imaginative experimental channels he explored to crystallize his inner self. The artist’s self-portraiture—“auto-portraits,” as he called them—constituted the core of his surrealist production, and his photographic knowledge was enriched while he implemented these early self-portraits. Self-taught, he often returned to photography books, from which he learned techniques of double and triple exposure, juxtaposition, sandwiching, solarization, and cutouts and thus triggered his imagination and sense of exploration. This article traces the arc of Van-Leo’s early surrealist phase, which lasted about a decade that coincided with the beginning of his career in the 1940s. Other than the surrealist self-portraits, his photographic archive also contains a few hundred more works that are just as eccentric, although they rely more on disguise skills, shadows, and contrasts, or constitute false personifications of characters in society, rather than a surrealist approach. Although Van-Leo’s work was detached from what the Egyptian surrealist philosophies called for, he was, it seems, a surrealist by accident.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42120268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the Editors","authors":"Salah M. Hassan, H. Al-Qasimi","doi":"10.1215/10757163-8971229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-8971229","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"48 1","pages":"4 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75621125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Surrealism and Photography in Egypt","authors":"M. Golia","doi":"10.1215/10757163-9435751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-9435751","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Over the course of three years researching thousands of old photographs for her 2010 book Photography and Egypt (Reaktion Books), the author came across few examples of what might be termed \"surrealist photography\" in Egypt and little evidence for the exhibitions organized by Art and Liberty, a group of Egyptian artists and writers who resisted the Nazi and fascist risings before and after World War II. Anchored by Samir Gharib's Surrealism in Egypt and Plastic Arts; correspondence between photographer Lee Miller, living in Cairo in the 1940s, and British artist and poet Roland Penrose; and Donald LaCoss's work and correspondence with Roland Penrose's son, Anthony, this article elaborates and adjusts some of the perceptions of the Art and Liberty group that appeared in Photography and Egypt. The group would eventually feel the wrath of the Anglo-Egyptian authorities for providing translations of Marxist-Leninist texts, condemnations of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist ideals and politics, and affirmations of social reform and freedom of expression. On the other hand, the author supposes that it may also be the case that only a few photographic works produced by artists associated with the Art and Liberty group can be called \"surrealist\" at all, as Egypt's surrealist moment left more prominent traces in painting and literature. Nonetheless, Art and Liberty's activities acknowledged photography as a creative medium at an early, experimental stage in its development, before it was derailed by the 1952 Officer's Revolution and, later, pressed into the service of the state. Despite the lack of access to the photographic record of works produced for or around Art and Liberty exhibitions, the author contributes contextual details for both those shows and the practice of photography around the time the group was active, illustrated by seminal images of works by Kamel Telmisany, Hassan El-Télmissany, Idabel, Hassia, Fouad Kamel, Wadid Sirry, Lee Miller, and others.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"43 1","pages":"144 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91354811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Those Who Shaped the Future","authors":"Hisham Geshta","doi":"10.1215/10757163-9435723","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-9435723","url":null,"abstract":"Author Hisham Geshta, literary and art critic and editor of Al Kitaba Al Ukhra (Other Writing), Cairo, Egypt, reminisces about his meeting and long-term relationship with writer and activist Anwar Kamel and their united efforts to publish established and emerging surrealist writers and poets in Al Tatawwur (Evolution) magazine in 1940 and after. Later, when Kamel is in his late seventies, in 1991, the author establishes and publishes Al Kitaba Al-Ukhra to continue the commitment. The author provides numerous excerpts from these and earlier publications that include the writings of Georges Henein, Ramses Younan, Kamel Telmisany, and era poets, illuminating the ideology and creative output of Egyptian surrealist artists and thought leaders across more than five decades.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44159554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beautiful Black Cloud of Modern Egyptian Art","authors":"Alex Dika Seggerman","doi":"10.1215/10757163-9435653","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-9435653","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper contextualizes the Art and Liberty group within the scope of Egyptian modern art. In doing so, it argues that this movement does not simply translate \"central\" Parisian surrealism to so-called \"peripheral\" Cairo. Rather, Art and Liberty represents a pivot in a continuum of Egyptian modern art and an important node in the transnational expansion of surrealism in the late 1930s. To situate the movement in a larger arc, this article spans the 1910s to the 1950s. An analysis of famous sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891–1934) first represents the nationalist and classicist origins of Egyptian modern art. Second, an examination of the Long Live Degenerate Art manifesto explicates the complexity of the group's ideology in its early days. Third, Kamel Telmisany's (1915–72) shift from expressionist painter and draftsman to realist filmmaker signals how aesthetics and mediums adapted to new iterations of the Art and Liberty ideology. Fourth, painter Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (1925–66) and the Contemporary Art Group epitomize the impact of Art and Liberty after World War II. This chronological progression illustrates how the Egyptian Art and Liberty group reacted vociferously against nationalism in politics and art, both locally and regionally. In doing so, they shifted the audience of modern Egyptian art and created a new, transnational public. For these reasons, the author calls this movement the \"Beautiful Black Cloud\" of modern Egyptian Art. It was violent, stormy, and did not always look \"pretty,\" but it was beautiful in its legacy.","PeriodicalId":41573,"journal":{"name":"Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art","volume":"78 1","pages":"40 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89404770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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