HANFANINHA

It begins with a line every time. I draw a line and it leads into a type of design, it’s not decorative, but it’s a design. And after I’m finished I look at it and there’s a theme that emerges,” Farida Dorra says, moving her hand to illustrate the path of her pen across an imaginary surface. Dorra is used to putting pen to paper and letting the ink lead the way. The recent AUC Art graduate shared a common ambition with fellow students Nour Omar and Heba Nawara.

“We wanted to open a gallery that’s different, that gives a chance to all kinds of artists, that was going to make a difference in Cairo,” explains Omar.

This vision, combined with the collaborative efforts of these three young artists, gave birth to Hanfaninha, a studio gallery in Zamalek that aims to present more than just paintings on a wall.

Hanfaninha, which roughly translates to “We’ll make it artistic,” targets up and coming artists, offering an inspiring alternative to Cairo’s sometimes unwelcoming well-established galleries. “We’re trying to attract more of the underground scene, people who don’t have a chance,” says Nawara, stressing the difficulty of finding a venue among the precious few scattered across downtown. Following the maxim of less is more, Hanfaninha keeps it simple with two display areas, one long exhibition hall and a room that can either be rented out as a studio or used for jewelry and craft displays.

A venue that prides itself on the diversity of its exhibitions, ranging from video installations and scarves to ceramics and paintings, it is only fitting that Hanfaninha had its origins in a university creativity class. “We had to go home and think of a goal we wanted to achieve over the next five or ten years, then present it to the class visually.” explains Omar. Her project was a miniature gallery complete with small print from her own work framed on tiny cardboard cut-outs. “At the time, I didn’t know Nour that well,” recalls Dorra, “but when she presented her idea, I thought ‘Why don’t we do something like this?’”

In 2008 Nawara, Omar, and Dorra began their search for the perfect spot to plant their artistic flag. Finally, they settled on Villa Dorra on 41 Mohammed Mazhar St. “The house belongs to Farida’s family and her aunt stays there sometimes,” explains Omar, but the basement and ground floor were uninhabited, and the three artists were free to transform them into a creative space. The transformation from cellar to studio, however, did not happen overnight.

“On paper it sounds easy,” says Nawara, who took a course in curating in preparation for their opening, “but in reality it’s much more complicated.”

Renovating the space, which hadn’t been used in nearly 30 years, proved a challenge for the young women. “At the beginning it was such a mess, we didn’t even want to come in,” jokes Dorra. “This room was a nightmare,” she continues, referring to their workshop that branches off from the craft display room. But after replacing the tiles, repainting the aging walls and making it habitable, “we moved in our tables, our paints, our canvases, and stayed here for four or five months, just painting, painting, painting, with no idea as to what would happen next.”

What in fact happened next was Hanfaninha’s successful opening exhibition in January 2009, showcasing paintings and drawings by Dorra, Omar and Nawara, traditional dyed Palestinian scarves by Dana Moussa and jewelry by Dalia Hamdallah.

The artists had previously displayed their graduation projects side-by-side at Falaki gallery in May ‘08, and while their style and medium of choice vary, they share a common tendency towards original themes, steering away from traditional forms of art.

“I don’t do still-life,” states Omar firmly, “It always starts with an idea or image I have in my head.” Her work deals with abstract concepts, portrayed through the bright, elongated features of her subjects and the splatter of acrylic paints across a boldly colored canvas.

“We are three very different people,” says Nawara, whose medium and style vary according to the concept she is working with. Some of her recent work deals with imperfection and its bizarre beauty, taking Cairo as an example and portraying her ideas through a series of mixed-media close-ups of old cracked walls. “They’re gorgeous; you would not believe that this is a crack in the wall. So this is what I focused on more, that its not a perfect city at all, it’s full of cracks, everywhere is cracked, but that out of it you could find something very beautiful, you could find something expressive.” Nawara openly expresses her artistic ideas with her partners, and appreciates the constant stream of feedback they provide. “It helps a lot because each person brings something different,” she adds.

Dorra, on the other hand, prefers to keep her ideas to herself until they have materialized into a finished piece. “Heba likes to take people’s opinion, but I like to keep my stuff hidden until its finished,” says Dorra, explaining that it is mainly to keep her drawings free from outside influences. Dorra works solely with ink and paper. Sometimes, her works take the form of gentle kaleidoscopic ink patterns, swirling on the paper and resembling something from a dream. Other times there are sharp lines, intersecting and overlapping. Some of her more recent pieces deal with the idea of alienation and the sanctity of private thoughts. “You could be this close to a person,” she elaborates, “but you have no idea what is going on in their mind.”

The three artists divulged what was on their minds, surrounded by creative clutter and the remains of the charity exhibition “Art for a Cause,” held at Hanfaninha in June. The two-day exhibition’s proceeds went towards funding a local project to introduce 25 street children to their rights under the new Child Law amendments. “We want the gallery to go [] into the community itself. We want to have this project called ‘Hanfanin Masr’. It’s not necessarily us going out to paint the walls in the street but we want to do more community based projects that don’t necessarily have to be charity,” says Nawara.

“We’re thinking of workshops, we’re thinking of going out into the street and doing things, not just inside the gallery,” continues Omar, who believes the local art scene is “there, but hard to see, and slowly emerging.”

One of the biggest obstacles to an aspiring artist is people’s unwillingness to take art seriously. “We still have people come in and ask ‘So this is your only job?’ Yes, believe it or not, this actually takes up all my time,” says Omar laughingly, “we’re not only trying to fill in the gallery gap here, but to influence the way people think, and their attitudes towards art and the craft itself.” They appear to have made some progress in that respect, regularly drawing an interesting mix of art enthusiasts and curious first timers to their shows.

Despite their differences, these women are tied together in their joint endeavor. “The three of us work together to curate the shows, and each one of us has their own perspective, so when we put it together it comes out as something new,” says Nawara. When preparing for a show, Nawara typically handles design, Dorra organizes the events and Omar prefers to be more hands-on, doing actual physical work. “First, we had people helping us out with the curating, there would be people on ladders putting up the stuff, and now it’s us — we’re on the ladders putting up the stuff,” says Dorra.

Hanfaninha offers artists the opportunity to hold group or solo exhibitions or to rent out the studio for affordable prices. Showing the work of select artists each month, Hanfaninha provides studio access and organizes an opening exhibition including curating and advertising. Their current exhibition displays the art of Emma James, also a former AUC student, who has lived in Cairo for 18 years and has chosen to portray the nuances of its culture through her paintings of Egyptian cinema icons. Her clean, bold, Warhol-esque style puts an unlikely combination of Fatin Hamama, Audrey Hepburn, Soad Hosni, Marilyn Monroe, Tahiya Karioka and Sophia Loren on the same canvas and makes it work. Also impressive was the large scale representation of Om Kolthoum, poised in mid-song, painted in black directly on the gallery’s white wall.

Artists who wish to exhibit must submit a one-page essay discussing their concept along with 10–20 samples of their work. While Hanfaninha takes technique into consideration, the young gallery owners are more concerned with the idea and helping it develop. “If we find that there is some potential, we sit down with the artist and collaborate with them, discuss their theme, and try to get the whole thing working better,” explains Dorra. “We’re looking for a combination of technique and concept, a good balance between the two,” explains Nawara, stressing their selectivity, “it can’t just be art that looks good.”  et

Photo: A Warhol-esque portrait of legendary stars by Emma Jones, currently being shown at the gallery.

http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=8655

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Friday, 9 January 2009