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Lot Essay
'She represented exactly what I wanted to say. She was the link between West and East in her music and in her self as a person, and I liked that. I felt something personal in her, and I related to it'
(Youssef Nabil, October 2009).'
'Threaded through Nabil's work is a deliberate commentary on East and West. Like the artist, each series shares a combined state of these influences and sensibilities. The various series have been noted for their purposeful references to Orientalism and the exoticized 'other'. Critic and curator Octavio Zaya described the photographs as 'vacilla(ting) between an unsatisfied search for an imaginary experience confronting those tired dichotomies of the Occident and the Orient-an experience which perhaps simultaneously affirms and exposes stereotypes and discrepancies of colonial desire-and the melancholic resignation of its impossibility in the age of general globalization and commodification'. This interplay is most apparent in Nabil's images of singer Natacha Atlas, whose pop music is a combination of North African and Arabic influences. Nabil depicts Atlas as the embodiment of strength and cosmopolitan glamour, with a certain unabashed confrontation in her poses. Whether she is unaware of our gaze as in Natacha with Eyes Closed, Cairo, 2000 in which she rests, lips parted, arms over head, amongst the blur of her spangled and jeweled costume, or confronting our stare as she kneels poised below a crown and cape ornament in Natacha with Crown, Cairo, 2000, she epitomizes the hybridity of contemporary culture and calls attention to the underpinnings of the Western gaze.
(Melissa Messina, Senior Curator of the Savannah College of Art and Design Exhibitions Department, in Youssef Nabil: I Live Within You, exh. cat., Atlanta, SCAD, 2009. This exhibition later travelled to Savannah, SCAD, 2010.)
(Youssef Nabil, October 2009).'
'Threaded through Nabil's work is a deliberate commentary on East and West. Like the artist, each series shares a combined state of these influences and sensibilities. The various series have been noted for their purposeful references to Orientalism and the exoticized 'other'. Critic and curator Octavio Zaya described the photographs as 'vacilla(ting) between an unsatisfied search for an imaginary experience confronting those tired dichotomies of the Occident and the Orient-an experience which perhaps simultaneously affirms and exposes stereotypes and discrepancies of colonial desire-and the melancholic resignation of its impossibility in the age of general globalization and commodification'. This interplay is most apparent in Nabil's images of singer Natacha Atlas, whose pop music is a combination of North African and Arabic influences. Nabil depicts Atlas as the embodiment of strength and cosmopolitan glamour, with a certain unabashed confrontation in her poses. Whether she is unaware of our gaze as in Natacha with Eyes Closed, Cairo, 2000 in which she rests, lips parted, arms over head, amongst the blur of her spangled and jeweled costume, or confronting our stare as she kneels poised below a crown and cape ornament in Natacha with Crown, Cairo, 2000, she epitomizes the hybridity of contemporary culture and calls attention to the underpinnings of the Western gaze.
(Melissa Messina, Senior Curator of the Savannah College of Art and Design Exhibitions Department, in Youssef Nabil: I Live Within You, exh. cat., Atlanta, SCAD, 2009. This exhibition later travelled to Savannah, SCAD, 2010.)