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Lot Essay
‘In my experience, most human beings are not able to see the world without a screen of social and cultural projections. I discovered the shape of Mashrabiya screens — windows, blinds, various cultural forms of architectural elements — in Cairo. The Mashrabiya protects the inside world from the outside; filtering the light and cooling the inside space; allowing one to observe without being seen. For me the Mashrabiya became an abstract symbol that operates in two directions with the possibility for dialogue, rather than closure. It separates, yet also filters and joins. It signifies the ‘in-between-ness’ of being in two cultures at the same time that it reflects personal experiences dealing with cross-cultural codes.’ (Susan Hefuna, in conversation with Bettina Matteis, Flash Art, 12 November 2010).
Christie’s is offering two works by Susan Hefuna that explore her delicate grid-like, minimalist compositions in her sculpture and drawings, tacitly interwoven within both the Western and Middle Eastern contexts. Born in Egypt to a Catholic German mother and Muslim Egyptian father, and later raised and educated in Germany, she witnessed a conflicted, multicultural upbringing and subtly and poetically channeled this into her artworks.
Lams is part of her mashrabiya series, with its form deriving from the traditional latticework of window screens, used since the Middle Ages, most notably in Egypt to enable air circulation, light filtration and to protect women from the public eye. Allowing a separation between public and private life, exterior and interview views, and between both men and women’s environment, this structure is charged with symbolism in both its formal, aesthetic and cultural overtones. Her investigation into the mashrabiya began in 1997, where she photographed her subjects through screen-carved windows, making it difficult to view the person, complicating the composition’s focal point. In 2004, Hefuna began her sculptural wooden and bronze screens such as this current lot, incorporating both English and Arabic phrases into its intricate patterns. Either notating Arabic phrases such as ‘Not for Sale - Enta Omri,’ sold at Christie’s Dubai for US $40,000 (April 2013) and ‘Smile’ (2008) every viewer, depending on which culture, would see the work differently, choosing to pay attention to certain aspects of the work more, whether it be the letters, or the form, transforming the mashrabiya screen into a social and cultural projection.
Lams, or ‘touch’ in Arabic readily signifies the viewer to create this lyrical and formal dialogue between the fabricator and viewer. To create these screens, Hefuna works closely with these craftsmen, providing them with sketches of the exact patterns to create. Up close, one does not notice the Arabic imprinted onto the wood, and it only when viewed from a certain distance outside of the private space that the words are legible. The physical creation of the screen from the mashrabiya craftsmen is a very talented trade that requires extreme attention to detail, requiring one to touch the work itself, both in eyes and hands.
As the artist mentioned of her interaction with the audience, she notes ‘I would like to tell about the key experience I had when I had my first solo show in Egypt in 1992, a high-tech multimedia installation. One of my digital photographs of a mashrabiya screen was instantly perceived as a familiar object. By contrast, all Western audiences had associated it with the Western concept of abstract art. This first-hand and unexpected feedback from Egypt was a complete surprise to me. A different audience saw the essence of the work and not its reflection, without having read any of my intentions or knowing anything about my background. From then on, my work was somehow enriched by this dual feedback: the historical, scientific, and aesthetic context of the work perceived by a Western eye, and the references that were immediately related to familiar surroundings by Egyptians. The reading of the work depended on the codes of each culture, the same form could refer to different ideas and images from the past and the present. I learned that there is no such thing as the Truth, but layers of interpretations or perceptions. The observer is responsible for what she/he sees. (Susan Hefuna, in conversation with Bettina Matteis, Flash Art, 12 November 2010).
Transitioning from Susan Hefuna’s mashrabiya works, her drawings represent a cornerstone of her oeuvre and experimentation in structure, with an ongoing body of work on tracing paper. These works present abstracted forms, inspired by microbial and microscopic constellations, cityscapes, orchestrated by a choreography of connected dots, lines and shapes. These delicate drawings have come to embody the work related to her life and travels, executed mostly in New York, becoming a miscellaneous view of her everyday encounters and connections and highlighting on the universality of humankind. As Hans Ulrich Obrist noted in an interview with the artist, "they are like architectural blueprints that oscillate between the two- and three-dimensional," and provide the foundation for the rest of Hefuna's body of work, wherein "everything is drawing."
Hefuna’s drawings draw inspiration from the mashrabiya structure, executed with ink and pencil on multiple sheets of tracing paper of varying translucency and thickness, and each simultaneously built upon and concealing a pattern with lines drawn on the sheet before. Each drawing is meticulously completed in one sitting, without interruption, where she holds the lines for as long as she is able to, connecting dots with lines, created spontaneously without any sketch beforehand. In her works, lines denote purity, an authentic reality of the artist’s intention, without nationality, time or space. ‘I always say: look at the drawings of an artist and you know everything about the artist. All I can say is that I have to draw. I’ve always drawn and will continue to make drawings. My drawings sustain me,’ (Susan Hefuna in conversation with Alex Greenberger, “Susan Hefuna on Mingling East and West in Her Art,” Artspace, 17 September 2013).
‘Though abstract and formal, [Susan Hefuna’s drawings] suggest the presence of a body, perhaps two bodies: that of the artist and that of the viewer. In their fragile beauty — some of them are literally harmed, pierced, perforated, bleeding, stitched together — the drawings are at once terrifying and hugely attractive. Terrifying in that they don’t conceal the wound that lives within them, a wound every foreigner knows; attractive because they draw strength and orientation from their pain and vulnerability. Although highly seductive, there is nothing voyeuristic about Hefuna’s drawings. The two layers protect one another, inviting [the viewer] to embark on a journey. In fact it is the viewer who makes sense of the patterns and grids, who decides what to foreground and what to push back. In this the drawings are deeply human. I think of them as a “corporeal map” (a concept hard to grasp within Western notions of rational space), a way of relating to a place, a city, a body that combines the experiential — always corporeal, always sensual — with the abstract without ever subjugating one to the other’ (Bettina Mathes, “Corporeal Map,” flash art, issue 275, November-December 2010)
Christie’s is offering two works by Susan Hefuna that explore her delicate grid-like, minimalist compositions in her sculpture and drawings, tacitly interwoven within both the Western and Middle Eastern contexts. Born in Egypt to a Catholic German mother and Muslim Egyptian father, and later raised and educated in Germany, she witnessed a conflicted, multicultural upbringing and subtly and poetically channeled this into her artworks.
Lams is part of her mashrabiya series, with its form deriving from the traditional latticework of window screens, used since the Middle Ages, most notably in Egypt to enable air circulation, light filtration and to protect women from the public eye. Allowing a separation between public and private life, exterior and interview views, and between both men and women’s environment, this structure is charged with symbolism in both its formal, aesthetic and cultural overtones. Her investigation into the mashrabiya began in 1997, where she photographed her subjects through screen-carved windows, making it difficult to view the person, complicating the composition’s focal point. In 2004, Hefuna began her sculptural wooden and bronze screens such as this current lot, incorporating both English and Arabic phrases into its intricate patterns. Either notating Arabic phrases such as ‘Not for Sale - Enta Omri,’ sold at Christie’s Dubai for US $40,000 (April 2013) and ‘Smile’ (2008) every viewer, depending on which culture, would see the work differently, choosing to pay attention to certain aspects of the work more, whether it be the letters, or the form, transforming the mashrabiya screen into a social and cultural projection.
Lams, or ‘touch’ in Arabic readily signifies the viewer to create this lyrical and formal dialogue between the fabricator and viewer. To create these screens, Hefuna works closely with these craftsmen, providing them with sketches of the exact patterns to create. Up close, one does not notice the Arabic imprinted onto the wood, and it only when viewed from a certain distance outside of the private space that the words are legible. The physical creation of the screen from the mashrabiya craftsmen is a very talented trade that requires extreme attention to detail, requiring one to touch the work itself, both in eyes and hands.
As the artist mentioned of her interaction with the audience, she notes ‘I would like to tell about the key experience I had when I had my first solo show in Egypt in 1992, a high-tech multimedia installation. One of my digital photographs of a mashrabiya screen was instantly perceived as a familiar object. By contrast, all Western audiences had associated it with the Western concept of abstract art. This first-hand and unexpected feedback from Egypt was a complete surprise to me. A different audience saw the essence of the work and not its reflection, without having read any of my intentions or knowing anything about my background. From then on, my work was somehow enriched by this dual feedback: the historical, scientific, and aesthetic context of the work perceived by a Western eye, and the references that were immediately related to familiar surroundings by Egyptians. The reading of the work depended on the codes of each culture, the same form could refer to different ideas and images from the past and the present. I learned that there is no such thing as the Truth, but layers of interpretations or perceptions. The observer is responsible for what she/he sees. (Susan Hefuna, in conversation with Bettina Matteis, Flash Art, 12 November 2010).
Transitioning from Susan Hefuna’s mashrabiya works, her drawings represent a cornerstone of her oeuvre and experimentation in structure, with an ongoing body of work on tracing paper. These works present abstracted forms, inspired by microbial and microscopic constellations, cityscapes, orchestrated by a choreography of connected dots, lines and shapes. These delicate drawings have come to embody the work related to her life and travels, executed mostly in New York, becoming a miscellaneous view of her everyday encounters and connections and highlighting on the universality of humankind. As Hans Ulrich Obrist noted in an interview with the artist, "they are like architectural blueprints that oscillate between the two- and three-dimensional," and provide the foundation for the rest of Hefuna's body of work, wherein "everything is drawing."
Hefuna’s drawings draw inspiration from the mashrabiya structure, executed with ink and pencil on multiple sheets of tracing paper of varying translucency and thickness, and each simultaneously built upon and concealing a pattern with lines drawn on the sheet before. Each drawing is meticulously completed in one sitting, without interruption, where she holds the lines for as long as she is able to, connecting dots with lines, created spontaneously without any sketch beforehand. In her works, lines denote purity, an authentic reality of the artist’s intention, without nationality, time or space. ‘I always say: look at the drawings of an artist and you know everything about the artist. All I can say is that I have to draw. I’ve always drawn and will continue to make drawings. My drawings sustain me,’ (Susan Hefuna in conversation with Alex Greenberger, “Susan Hefuna on Mingling East and West in Her Art,” Artspace, 17 September 2013).
‘Though abstract and formal, [Susan Hefuna’s drawings] suggest the presence of a body, perhaps two bodies: that of the artist and that of the viewer. In their fragile beauty — some of them are literally harmed, pierced, perforated, bleeding, stitched together — the drawings are at once terrifying and hugely attractive. Terrifying in that they don’t conceal the wound that lives within them, a wound every foreigner knows; attractive because they draw strength and orientation from their pain and vulnerability. Although highly seductive, there is nothing voyeuristic about Hefuna’s drawings. The two layers protect one another, inviting [the viewer] to embark on a journey. In fact it is the viewer who makes sense of the patterns and grids, who decides what to foreground and what to push back. In this the drawings are deeply human. I think of them as a “corporeal map” (a concept hard to grasp within Western notions of rational space), a way of relating to a place, a city, a body that combines the experiential — always corporeal, always sensual — with the abstract without ever subjugating one to the other’ (Bettina Mathes, “Corporeal Map,” flash art, issue 275, November-December 2010)