I dreamed of a purple artificial forest.
I created an artificial purple theatre.
Parts of home furniture, human parts.
The bed was surrounded with electricity pylons.
I was lying.
Parts of a human body.
Hand, legs, a face.
All looking into the mirror.
The only thing I see him devouring my picture.
Parts of home furniture.
Dinner table.
They were sitting at the end of the tunnel.
They were sitting across the table eating me once more.
They eat each other.
My legs grow.
I give birth to light, and the light eats me.
And I melt into a tunnel of endless darkness.
Parts of home furniture, human parts.
Poem by the artist
No, she is not a Sheherazade from a thousand and one nights, who tells us stories in order to delay the unknown. With her enchanting femininity, Amal Kenawy talks about the departure to a new world, her artificial purple forest where behind every tree an arm, a branch, or a new dream lay concealed.
Amal Kenawy had actually planed to work on a new play for which she was to design the set. The production was delayed and to pass time, she started drawing. Since she could not work on real scenery, why not invent an imaginary play with Indian ink and water on paper that developed a life of its own through animation.
For a period of eight months, starting August 2004, she went on a paper voyage that turned into a voyage to her inner self. A bed, a leg, a tree, a spider, mauve biscuits, branches that grow out of legs, bars from a child’s cot that develop into the narrowing walls of a staircase leading into the depth of the room – one image after the other, mounted together by Amal Kenawy with the assurance of a sleep-walker. Her drawings of archetypal forms are reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois: the spider, the bed, and the bars. Her dream of an artificial purple forest, cut to become more abstract and faster as time goes by, lasts eight minutes that stand for the eight months of production.
She says that she has chosen abstraction as her medium because it is suited to transport her ideas. Free from conventions and expectations, she hunts down the images of her dreams that in turn take a hold of her. Sheet after sheet is filled with her drawings, image after image is added up to a boundless abundance.
Text by Anne Maier: Amal Kenawy - Purple Rose of Cairo
(From the German: Helen Adkins)