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Nourhan Refaat Maayouf, the 28-year-old Egyptian visual artist – who will have her first solo show titled The Sea is Closed: Shallow Water at the Absa Gallery from today – is in many ways a fish out of water.
Maayouf was born and raised in Egypt. Her parents encouraged her to draw and she showed promise as a child. When adulthood approached she decided to read commerce and marketing, because earning a living from art was not a financially secure prospect. More than five years went by in which Maayouf created photographic and videographic works on weekends and nine-to-fived in the marketing and communications sector during the week.
A similar narrative could be superimposed on many striving visual artists from Cairo to Cape Town and in most major cities in-between.
Look below the surface, however, and the undercurrents that have carried her career and course through her works can transport the viewer away in a tumultuous maelstrom.
Maayouf began to experiment with digital photography in 2011. Beyond the walls of her home, where she continued to live as is the social norm for unmarried young women, the streets were ablaze with the Arab spring revolution.
Maayouf turned inwards, training her lens on the domestic.
She wrote from Paris, where she had a six-month residency at the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts: “I believe the major trigger for me to focus on home and the nature of relationships is that I have been through a lot of challenging experiences throughout my upbringing within home and in my personal relationships.”
While becoming comfortable behind the lens as a relatively wet-behind-the-ears, self-taught photographer, she found a similar ease in front of the camera with her self-portraiture work.
“Photography is a tool for self-expression,” she writes. “It’s the best tool that gave me the opportunity to become the performer in front of the camera and express myself freely, just like documenting a visual diary.”
July Tale, the triptych that won Maayouf the overall 2016 Absa L’Atelier Award, is an example of the confluence of strong, stripped-down posing and a clear, powerful message that is the foundation of Maayouf’s developing aesthetic. You won’t catch her dripping cameras or lugging lights and other gear around either, her message takes centre stage above the performance of being “photographer”.
Diving in
The politics of outside cannot be separated from the politics in doors. After Arab Spring many middle-class individuals and families emigrated from Egypt in pursuit of calmer, more prosperous shores. Maayouf struggled with loneliness as some of her friends moved abroad. And when she found herself in Paris for the residency that came with the L’Atelier prize, she was stirred to engage more directly with the zeitgeist swirling around her place as a female, Egyptian visual artist.
The Sea is Closed: Shallow Water investigates the idea of home as a place left behind. It looks at the cost paid in pursuit of “economic and psychological wellbeing”. The personal still anchors this work, as with most of Maayouf’s works. The long-term project, made up of photography and videography, came into being when she made her maiden voyage outside Egypt.
Maayouf is not alone in venturing into uncharted waters. The Absa Gallery in Johannesburg has steered towards including more voices from further afield than southern Africa.
The Barclays Africa footprint has stretched to include more African countries and this has yanked the gallery into recognising talent in the region and redefining the familiar. Absa Gallery curator Paul Bayliss said: “Historically, our focus was on southern African artists, I think that’s what’s going to make it fairly unique, we don’t always recognise and celebrate the young talent that we have that resides in our backyard, so to speak.”
This interrogation of home, of the familiar and the foreign could not be better bedded in Johannesburg, a cornucopia of cultures, languages and experiences from throughout the continent. Perhaps it is high time for conversations such as the one Maayouf opens to be had more often. Perhaps then Johannesburg will begin to recognise itself as a home and harbour for all who sail into it.
- Maayouf’s show opens at the Absa Gallery today and runs till on June 15. Gallery hours: Mon to Fri: 8.30am to 3.30pm. Saturday: 8am to 11am. Closed Sunday and public holidays
