A
Nocturnal Affair
by Aleya Hamza
"Autoportrait of three artists after talking until dawn" is the
title given to a project
conceived by Mahmoud Khaled, Stephan Köperl and Sylvia Winkler for their
involvement
in "Dar al-Hiwar" (House of Dialogue), initiated and now hosted
for the third year by
the Goethe-Institut in Cairo.
According to the stated objectives of the organizers, Dar al-Hiwar functions
as the
Goethe-Institut's answer to reductionist categorizations of Self and Other
often perpetuated
through such events as "conferences, seminars and discussions that try
to promote
the so-called 'dialogue' between the Islamic countries and the West".
As such, they invite selected individuals from both Germany and Egypt to deploy
contemporary
artistic practices such as performance, computer art and installation in an
effort towards
less pre-defined processes of self-examination.
Without expectations, the artists in question sat down to discuss the possibilities
relevant
for such an undertaking. Finally they decided to meet during eight nights
in different locations
to talk about various subjects until the morning. As far as they were concerned,
their
conversations could have taken place anywhere in the world. It could very
well have been
a rooftop in Istanbul, a cultural centre in Bombay or a hotel room in Sydney.
The locations they chose were completely contingent upon circumstance, dictated
by plausible
options available to three individual foreigners in an immense city.
As soon as darkness gives way to the morning light, each would go their separate
ways,
only to meet again the following evening for the beginning of yet another
session.
Their exchange is framed by the existing limitations, their physical and mental
capacities,
their relationship to one another, and inevitably, to the space they occupy.
Undoubtedly, the decision to stay up all night repeatedly was deliberate:
not only to simulate
a bubble of solitude (where the persistent impositions of modern society are
removed) but by
consciously inverting the normative cycle of sleep, the body, deprived of
rest, tends to suffer
from fatigue and physical exhaustion. This in turn influences the faculties
of perception,
reflection and communication. Each experiences fluctuating states of heightened
and
diminished consciousness, interjected by the occasional rush of adrenalin;
steaming coffee
in a paper cup - a brisk walk through the emptiness of a sleeping city? the
perfect articulation
of an elusive thought, if only to vanish into the abyss of memory seconds
later.
A sequence of blown up photographic images of the three artists taken at the
break of dawn
mark the end of each of their sessions. The images are qualified by the presence
of the
accompanying text, thereby setting the parameters of their meanders, both
to them and
to the viewer. This set of coordinates identifies the duration of time they
spent together,
the date and the location, along with a compound statement - a title of sorts
- referring to
the subject that dominated their conversations during that night. The combination
of visuals
and text, seemingly mundane, perhaps even self-absorbed, remain as a material
memento
of the open-ended performance they alone witnessed and enacted.
Their role is to engage with each other in an open-ended discourse, without
conscious
restrictions on the direction of their discussion. Yet the very notion of
coming up with one
single title that aptly encapsulates the meanderings of their conversation
entails retroactively
imposing (and confronting) a recognizable order on the chaotic flow of sound
bites that had
occurred between the three parties. It entails identifying an outline of what
three different
individuals agree upon as the crux of their nightly ruminations by collectively
revisiting
their recent past.
In presenting us the outlines of their nocturnal encounters, they invite us
to rethink their
thoughts, to re-imagine what their sessions, both self-indulgent and austere,
might have
brought to the surface. Moreover, what they end up with, or rather what we
as spectators
end up seeing, is a serialized voyeuristic account of intimate affair between
three different
individuals in a strange place. An account that exists as testament to the
presence of a
human capacity to dissect, to debate, to withstand, to contemplate, to remember
and
to share.