Egypt was in turmoil when Mohamed Abla was first met, and the artist, weary but combative, protested on the steps of the Ministry of Culture in Cairo. It was 2013, the brief period of Islamist interregnum, and much of the country feared that the Muslim Brotherhood were planning an Egyptian caliphate, certainly the abolition of art. And this in a country whose art has always been nothing more than an image of eternity.
On Sunday, Mohamed Abla will be awarded the Goethe Medal in Weimar, and he now knows that those were happy times. Even decades of Mubarak’s rule tolerated counter-speech: “We critics of the regime had films, newspapers, we could do everything,” says Abla in the Berlin office of the Goethe-Institut: “Once I even won against Mubarak in court when the state accused us of wanted to evict from an island on the Nile to build hotels. It was wonderful!”
“We thought the land was ours.”
Even more glorious was the revolution, the Arab Spring, which swept away Mubarak in February 2011 and also intoxicated Abla: “We were full of hope, we thought the country was ours.” But Egypt did not belong to the Egyptians, it belonged – once again – to the military. Since 2013, since the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has ruled, like Vladimir Putin, a former intelligence chief.
Mohamed Abla was still working figuratively: “The Happy Island” (2016).
(Photo: Courtesy the Artist and Tabari Artspace Dubai photography Emad Abdel Hady)
At first, Abla was quite willing to cooperate, taking part in the 50-strong constitutional committee, until Sisi threw out all the drafts for limiting the term of office of the president and did what the Muslim Brotherhood had been accused of: he abolished art. Cairo’s free arts festival, Al-Fan Midan, is history. The Townhouse Gallery, a contemporary art and art education institution in Cairo, has been shut down in an attempt to shrunk and rename something of its former spirit. And Mohamed Abla has fallen silent, withdrew, paints symbolic or abstract things, such as a colorful cacti series in 2020, with blue, red and beige plants. You could mistake them for another of his colorful plant depictions if they didn’t have something eerily anthropomorphic about them.
His Cairo pictures show brutally torn open facades
His visionary Cairo pictures from 2010 would not be shown today. The brutally torn open facades of the “Cairo Towers” or the bridges tearing the city open like a whiplash would be far too easy to decipher as a commentary on the real urban renewal mania: “Sisi wants that Build the tallest tower in Africa, the tallest mosque, the tallest new capital. He’s obsessed with records.”
Abla knows that he is being monitored and that his guests are also being carefully recorded, for example the visitors to the Fayoum Art Center and the Caricature Museum which he founded in the Fayoum oasis near Cairo. “I’m pragmatic. I want to help young artists, I can do that with my art center,” he says. “There’s no opposition any more, no free broadcasters. The political struggle isn’t warm,” he says. Sometimes, when they are alone, they do talk, but only softly.
Images of people like “The Crowds” (2012) by Mohamed Abla are reminiscent of the painting style of the Berlin savages.
(Photo: Courtesy the Artist, photography Hamdy Reda)
So if you want to know how a dictatorship silences people, how it can be that even the smartest and most creative people don’t rebel, as it is currently popularly said, or even better, shake the hated regime, you don’t have to start with big ones eyes on Russia. He can ask artists like Mohamed Abla. Maybe this weekend in Weimar, at least outside of Egypt. In any case, you will hardly find intellectuals who are far removed from the regime there. So many fled from Sisi that the question is circulating in intellectual circles as to whether the real Egypt, its intellectual and cultural center, has long been in exile.
As a farewell gift, he gave Walsrode a sculpture
Abla, after all, will not go into exile. His story is one of homecoming. Born in 1953 in the Nile Delta, he studied art against his father’s will, fine arts in Alexandria, sculpture in Vienna and Zurich. He experienced his liberation as an artist in Germany, in Berlin in the 1980s: “The Neue Wilden worked there, they took all the freedom they wanted, they invented their own material, painted with a broad brush. That changed my art.” He lived in Walsrode, Lower Saxony, for a few years, later gave the town an enigmatic Sisyphus sculpture, but in 1986 he first returned to Egypt.
Since then he has exhibited in the Netherlands, Sweden and Kuwait, and the British Museum in London has shown his paintings. He could live anywhere, yet chooses Egypt. “Sisi is not my enemy,” he says. “He doesn’t see us. And we don’t see him.” The fact that he doesn’t take the artists’ autocracy so seriously also saved Abla from worse, his international prominence also protects him, and if the Goethe Medal contributes to this protection, then it has already fulfilled its most important function.
The other is that Goethe was very important to him, the “Diwan” of course, “Werther” and “Faust”, which he first read in Arabic and later, when his German improved, in the original. His view of Germany is distant but mild. To him, German self-referentiality sounds less like narcissism and more like a real struggle – with history, with responsibility as the most important country in Europe that has to find its way between the USA and Russia: “Germany doesn’t have it easy either.”
Oil paints are a luxury in Egypt, “like dog food”
After the award ceremony he will continue to Kassel, to the Documenta, perhaps to the Venice Biennale. But he has already completed the most important part of the program: a shop selling artists’ supplies. In Egypt, it’s almost impossible to get hold of paints, and customs make everything unaffordable. “For the state, oil paints are a luxury like dog food,” he says. He almost cried before the selection in Berlin, then made a bulk purchase and can hardly wait until he’s back in Egypt, in front of his easel.