Research
Lectures
Women’s Arts Education in Egypt (1908-1952)
A Struggle where Feminism and Nationalism Converge
Speaker: Nadine Atallah
Date: April 2025
Innocent Ornaments? Weaving a Distance from the Canon
Modern and Contemporary Lecture and Seminar Series
Speaker: Nadia Radwan
26 Feb 2024
Vernon Square Campus, Lecture Theatre 2
Taking Shape Webinar Session 1: The Barjeel Art Foundation and Taking Shape
Speakers: Sultan Al-Qassemi, Suheyla Takesh, Lynn Gumpert
Recorded: May 28, 2020
Academic Writing
Yugoslav–Egyptian cultural relations : a case study of art intersections in Ljubljana and Alexandria in the 1960s and 1970s
Author(s):Barbara Predan, Daša Tepina
Date: 2023
Article DOI: 10.51938/9789612971427
Abstract: The aim of the paper is to explore how the Non-Aligned Movement influenced the cultural relations between Yugoslavia and Egypt in the 1960s and 1970s and to clarify how this impacted the reception of fine art originating from the non-aligned countries in the former Yugoslavia (FPRY/SFRY). As one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement, the country—then named FPRY—was gaining increasing importance and prestige in the international political arena through its international policies. We will be tracing cultural policies by examining three premises that characterise both the politics of Yugoslavia and the politics of the Non-Aligned Movement: anti-colonialism, anti-imperialist struggles and decolonisation; the politics of non-involvement and peaceful coexistence, and finally the Yugoslav self-management. In the text we demonstrate how these fundamental principles of non-alignment were expressed in the area of artistic practices in individual artistic intersections, namely Ljubljana and Alexandria. Our central focus will be the 1960s and early 1970s, which is when the founding and the bulk of the activities of the Non-Aligned Movement took place. We will be examining the case of two central art venues that served as important intersections of cultural, as well as political international relations between Egypt and Yugoslavia. These artistic manifestations are the Ljubljana International Biennial of Graphic Arts (MGB) and the Alexandria Biennial for Mediterranean Countries, both of which were founded in 1955. The influence of cultural policies will also be explored in more depth, as the focus of our interest is in how the principles of non-alignment were reflected in the work of individual artists from the UAR who exhibited at the MGB. With this in mind, we will be examining the opus of artist Menhat Allah Helmy at the MGB. The text presents an overview of the political background of the biennials, which it examines mainly through an analysis of archival materials from the Archive of Yugoslavia and the archives of the International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana. While it is mainly based on an analysis of material from the Commission for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries fund and the cultural agreements and conventions on cooperation established between Yugoslavia and Egypt, it also draws on structured interviews with contemporary actors and the existing literature.
Menhat Helmy and the Emergence of Egyptian Women Art Teachers and Artists in the 1950s
Author(s): Patrick Kane
Date: September 2022
Article DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050095
Abstract: The rise of Egyptian women artists and art teachers at the end of the 1940s appeared in tandem with an active women’s movement that asserted the agency of women in modern Egyptian public life. In this article, we discuss the art career of Menhat Helmy (1925–2004), a 1949 arts grad- uate of the ma`had al-ali li-ma`lumat al-funun al-jamila (Higher Institute for Women Teachers of the Fine Arts), located in the working-class district of Bulaq in Cairo, and who was among the first Egyptian graduates of the Slade School of Art in London. In a series of etchings executed from around 1956 and through the 1960s, Helmy produced a visual commentary on the dignity of Bulaq’s residents, with emphasis on the active presence of women in its neighborhood and public spaces. Helmy may be viewed in context with the feminism of her fellow women artists, including Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021) and Inji Efflatoun (1924–1986), and in relation to Efflatoun’s two books on feminist causes. As new professional artists and teachers, they advocated the promotion of education and vocational choice for women. Helmy’s choice of this neighborhood as a subject for art allows a com- parison to theories about Bulaq’s development and its locus for the arts for which a multidisciplinary approach is required.
Categories and contemporaries: African artists at the Slade School of Fine Art (c.1945–65)
Author(s) Gabriella Nugent
Date: November 2022
Article DOI: https:/doi.org/10.31452/bcj7.slade.nugent
Abstract: Artists from all over the world studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, but the categories of art history and the organisation of museums have rarely allowed them to be studied, taught or exhibited alongside each other. Their separation and dissociation can be attributed to art history’s strong attachment to national narratives. The nation state has operated as the epistemological framework through which artists are grouped and works of art are examined. Even as the ‘global turn’ has sought to combat the Eurocentric assumptions of modernism, it has often perpetuated the discipline’s methodological nationalism, obscuring the cosmopolitan networks to which artists belonged. These national narratives contribute to larger continental frameworks that exacerbate divisions between artists who often sat side by side together in the same classroom.
The Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts: Articulating Nonaligned Modernism (pp. 176-213)
Author(s): Bojana Videkanić
Date: 2019
Article DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxw3pdd.9
Abstract: The Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, established in 1955, is one of the oldest of its kind in the world. Among its key mandates during the socialist era were the showcasing of artists from non-Western (eventually nonaligned) countries and the promotion of Yugoslavia’s role in the internationalization of modern art, cultural cooperation, and peaceful coexistence. As with other international exhibitions organized in Yugoslavia in the 1950s, the biennale promoted and legitimized an international modernist aesthetic as an accepted political, social, and cultural form, solidifying the country’s transition from hardline Soviet-style governance to a more liberal, socialist-humanist one.
الموروثات البيئية في الأعمال الجرافيكية لرائدات فن الجرافيك العربي
بحث مقدم من : أيمن قـدري محمد حامد
مدرس بقسم الجرافيك - كلية الفنون الجميلة
جامعة جنوب الوادي - مصر.
المقدمة .
الريادة هي الدور البارز وغير المسبوق في خلق مقومات بناء جديد , والكشف عن أفكار جديدة قادرة على خلق تأثيرات في مسيرة الفن , كما أنها القدرة على الابتكار في زمن معين يسعى الفنان لتحقيقها من خلال دوره البارز غير المسبوق الذي يبقى تأثيره ملموساً خلال مسيرة الفن , لقد ساهمت الفنانات الرائدات في تأسيس الحركة الفنية العربية , وفي وضع القواعد , والأُسُس السليمة لفن الجرافيك وتطوره , ومهما يكن من أمر فإن لهذا الجيل تميزه الواضح , فقد كن حريصات على أن يصبون إلى تحقيق الخصوصية المحلية , من خلال لغته التشكيلية العالمية المعاصرة ممزوجة بإحساس شرقي متناغم مع بيئته ومفرداته الذاتية الثرية .
كما أن البدايات التاريخية الأولى لحركة فن الجرافيك العربية التي بدأت منذ أكثر من ثمانين عاماً , تحمل زخماً كبيراً من العطاء تتعدد ينابيعه , ولم تحظ بما هي جديرة به من دراسة ورصد ونقد كافٍ , وهذا البحث يستعرض جزءاً من هذه الدراسات , ورصداً لرائدات فن الجرافيك العربي , ومنهن : منحة الله حلمي , ثريا عبد الرسول , ومريم عبد العليم من مصر, وفـوزية الهيـشري من تونس , وثـريا البقـصمي من الكويت , وزهرة بوعلي من السعودية , واليمنية إلهام العرشي .
وهؤلاء الرائدات شققن الطريق الصعب ومهدن للأجيال الجديدة , وجاهدن حتى أثبتن وجودهن من خلال تجاربهن الجرافيكية , ولتعدد مصادر الرؤية والاستلهام في الفنون المعاصرة اتجهن وارتكزن إلى الجذور والتنقيب في بيئتهن ومورثهن , يستثمرن أشكالها ومفرداتها في أعمالهن الجرافيكية الفنية تعبيراً عن تواصلهن مع حركة الحياة واندماجهن بها , مما اكسبن أعمالهن طابعاً عربياً مميزاً .
Modern Painting in the Mashriq
Author(s): Wijdan Ali
Date: 2001
Abstract: Easel painting is a fairly recent phenomenon in Arab-Islamic art. As the aesthetic and creative fiber of traditional Islamic culture weakened in the nineteenth cen- tury, Arab culture yielded increasingly to Western art forms and styles that had already pervaded the Arab world due to the West’s political, economic, scientific, and military superiority. Above all, increased means of communications between Europe and the Arab countries exposed the Arab world to the West at an ever- growing rate. This simultaneous weakness and exposure led to the expansion of Western art and culture in the Middle East. During the second half of the nine- teenth century, Arabs in general were influenced by the newly-imported, progres- sive ideas coming from Europe. Western concepts, born with the French Revolution and brought into Egypt by Napoleon’s expedition, coupled with the literary, philosophical, and artistic movements that had started in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had the effect of liberating Arab artists, among other intellectuals, from Ottoman traditions that had constrained them. They offered a means by which people could attain their national aspirations based on the doctrines of liberty and equality.