Moataz Nasr: Reflections in a Cairo Puddle, a Village on Film

For six months, Moataz Nasr pointed a camera at puddles in the streets of Egypt. What he filmed was not the water but the people reflected in it: men, women and children who drift into view on the surface and hold there for a moment, until a boot comes down and breaks the image apart. The work is called The Water, and it dates from 2002. The Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College describes it as a study of self and circumstance, made by an artist troubled by the hardship his compatriots faced under Hosni Mubarak’s government in the years before the Arab Spring.

The piece is usually shown on a screen. When the touring exhibition Senses of Time: Video and Film-Based Works of Africa reached the Wellin in 2016, the video was instead projected onto a real pool of water. Visitors leaning over the pool saw their own faces enter the broken, shifting picture, which put them in the same unstable position as the people in the film. It is a fair summary of Nasr’s method: take something ordinary, frame it so that it carries political weight, and let the viewer complete the circuit.

An economist who left the numbers

Nasr was born in Alexandria in 1961 and lives and works in Cairo. The Sharjah Art Foundation describes him as self taught, with a formal education in economics. Contemporary And notes that he first entered the Egyptian art scene by winning a competition run by the Ministry of Culture while he was still studying economics in Alexandria.

The breakthrough came in 2001, when he took the Grand Prize at the eighth International Cairo Biennial, a result both the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Nadour Collection record. A prize at the Dakar Biennale followed in 2002, according to both Nadour and Wikipedia. From there his work moved quickly into the international circuit. The Sharjah Art Foundation lists group appearances at the Venice Biennale in 2003, the São Paulo and Busan biennials in 2004, the Monash University Museum of Art in 2006, the Lubumbashi biennial in 2010 and the Thessaloniki Biennale in 2011. Nadour adds shows at the Centre Pompidou and the Hayward Gallery in 2005, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2006 and the Grand Palais in Paris in 2008.

Materials that carry a history

Nasr does not commit to one medium. Sharjah lists painting, sculpture, photography and video, and Contemporary And adds installation. Nadour describes him as a versatile artist who uses all of these to build installations that leave viewers wide freedom to explore.

What connects the media is subject matter. The Sharjah Art Foundation says his work examines cultural developments in the Islamic world and on the African continent, with attention to the injustices and difficulties people face. Nadour frames it in more personal terms, as an art drawn from Egyptian heritage that keeps returning to solitude, powerlessness in the face of rapid change, and a sharp sense of abandonment.

At the seventh Sharjah Biennial in 2005, he showed Echo, a video installation from 2003. His solo exhibitions over the following decade read almost like a diary of the region’s politics. Sharjah lists Entrapment at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano in 2006, Cairo Walk in Kuwait in 2008, and, in 2011, In a Nutshell in London and The Maze (The People Want the Fall of the Regime) at MAP in Gothenburg. The Tunnel followed at Galleria Continua in Beijing in 2012. Nadour also records a solo exhibition at the Château de Blandy in France in 2011.

Time, distorted

The Water has travelled further than most of Nasr’s works, largely through Senses of Time. The exhibition was co-organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it ran in the Hammer Building from December 20, 2015, to January 2, 2017. LACMA’s summary says Nasr’s work “treads on personal identities distorted by the march of time”.

The Wellin version, on view from September 10 to December 11, 2016, was the largest iteration of the show. It brought together nine works by seven artists: Sammy Baloji, Jim Chuchu, Theo Eshetu, Moataz Nasr, Berni Searle, Yinka Shonibare and Sue Williamson. The curatorial thread was the idea that time need not move in a straight line forward. Works in the show repeat, loop, layer and reverse.

Nasr’s piece fits that frame closely. The figures in the puddles appear only briefly, and their hold on the present looks fragile. Each time the boot lands, the reflected person is gone. The Wellin’s press material reads the reflecting pool as a suggestion that everyone is in flux, with circumstances outweighing any individual’s ability to hold things steady.

Building a place for others

Nasr opened Darb 1718 in Old Cairo in November 2008, a centre for contemporary art and culture. The date appears in both Nadour’s biography and Wikipedia, and the Sharjah Art Foundation lists the founding as one of the main facts of his career. Nadour describes the centre as sitting in the city’s historic district and dedicated to promoting contemporary art in Egypt.

For a self taught artist who came in from economics, the decision to build an institution is telling. Having made his own way into the Egyptian art world through a ministry competition, he went on to create a venue for the scene around him, not only a studio for himself.

The Mountain at Venice

In 2017 Nasr represented Egypt at the 57th Venice Biennale. The pavilion in the Giardini was open from May 13 to November 26 under the theme “This too shall pass.” Inside, he presented The Mountain, a work that Contemporary And describes as an examination of the facts and the fears of village life in Egypt today.

The pavilion was turned into an immersive environment. Complex lighting and a large-scale film projection told the story of an imagined village, and the installation was built to absorb visitors completely rather than to be looked at from a distance.

Fifteen years separate The Water from The Mountain, and the scale changed enormously, from a monitor or a pool to an entire national pavilion. The concern did not. In both, Nasr takes a small Egyptian community, a street or a village, and asks what pressures bear down on the people inside it. In both, the viewer is pulled into the picture: once as a face reflected in water, later as a body inside the village itself.