Sometimes you find cool stuff by accident. Often, it’s stuff that you don’t know much of or care about. So it was in my expedition to the “
Colleges of Fenway” area, which I was crossing through to get to the new-and-improved
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (more on that in a coming post).
Cutting through to the Fens from Huntington Avenue on my bicycle, I rode by the
Museum of Fine Arts, noting that, though it was a weekday, they were bumping. The “parking lot full” sign greeted me as I rode by. On the other side of the road, at the
School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA), there was a banner on the building that read “
Histories of Now: Six Artists from Cairo.” I know very little about modern Egypt, less about modern art, and (embarrassingly) virtually nothing about the revolution that recently took place in that country. Regardless, I was out to check out new things, and I was frankly not doing so well, resorting to updated versions of things I’d already seen. This was an exhibit in a place I’d never been, and better yet, it appeared to be free. I decided to bite.
I locked up on a spiral bike rack I imagined was made in house. It was attractive, but not terribly utilitarian: The spiral was too short for my 53 cm Surly, so I had to sort of lean it diagonally to get my lock to connect. Walking through the mini-courtyard toward the school entrance, I was met by about two-dozen art students, all rebelling by dressing almost identically. About half of them were smoking. I brushed off my self-righteous inclination to indignantly question how people were still doing that.
Security’s pretty lax at SMFA. Or maybe I just looked like another art student. The guard at the door wouldn’t have questioned me, but I approached him and asked where “this Egypt exhibit” was.
He pointed it out, and then refused my offer to sign in somewhere. I took a right and entered a few rooms full of mostly-digital media.
There are, as the subtitle of the exhibit states, six Egyptian artists featured. To the layman (read: me), it was not clear that there was much of a different between the pieces. The majority were video projections of Egyptians on walls, or video on plasma screens. Immediately at the entrance, there was an Egyptian man yelling on a screen about being Egyptian. I went to the room on the right first, where I was face-to-face with a classroom full of Egyptian women (there were a few men) projected on a wall, repeating “My mind is” in Egyptian Arabic, followed by a series of poetic non sequiturs.
This was accompanied by another projection on a standing screen of a man scribbling on a chalkboard, and a poster of what appeared to be a subway map on a human’s head, along with the title of artist Shady El Noshokaty’s room-sized contribution, “Stammer.”
The next sub-room ran an old movie on one screen and an impromptu speech on another right next to it. The video for the speech was being run in negative. The words between the speech and the film, according to the subtitles, seemed to coincide. This was called “The Echo,” by
Moataz Nasr.
On the main wall, there were three projections of men in flowing robes, one blue, one red, and one green, spinning continuously. The provided literature explained that this is a traditional Egyptian dance that allows Sufis to reach a “higher state of consciousness which raises them above difference and conflict into a perfect state of peace and balance.” It looked to me like it would make you very dizzy.