ARTISTS

Fathi Hassan

Fathi Hassan (aka Akkij Fathi) was born in Cairo in 1957 to Nubian-Egyptian parents. His family were forced to leave their homeland of Nubia when the Aswan High Dam was built in 1952, flooding a vast area now under Lake Nasser. Whether in photographs, paintings, installations, drawings or, often, directly on walls, his texts are deliberately illegible intended to highlight the plight of lost languages and oral history as a result of colonial domination.

He was one of the first African and Arab artists to exhibit in the Venice Biennial in 1988; and, over the past 40 years, participated in numerous solo and group shows In Africa, Europe, and USA. For many years he has worked productively with renowned curator Rose Issa and currently lives and works between Edinburgh, Scotland and Italy.

Fathi Hassan is an artist, a poet, a dreamer; but, most of all, he is a dynamic creative set on taming his wild spirit and wandering soul through his art and meditations. Hassan’s visual work firstly pulls in the viewer with its bold lines, then the floating texts, figures and symbols. Once that information and layer is absorbed, his pieces translate into a higher level of an alchemical synthesis. His articulation unto the canvas is a deep form of poetry.

Some of Hassan’s work is in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum, London and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC and Farjam Collections among many others.

Jihan EL-Tahri

Jihan El Tahri is an Egyptian/French multi-award-winning film director, writer, visual artist and producer. She has been a member of The Academy (Oscars) since 2017 and is on the selection committee for the Locarno Film Festival. She has also served on several boards and African film organisations, including: The Federation of Pan-African Cinema and The Guild of African Filmmakers in the Diaspora.

El-Tahri’s film and installations tend to consider political history through the solidarity movements of Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, the process of decolonisation and its aftermath. At the heart of her work lies the question of what happened to the founding fathers of independence and why their work and efforts for a better future have been thwarted.

Over a long career, El Tahri has directed over 15 films and her art exhibitions have travelled to renowned museums around the world and featured in international art biennales. In 2004 El Tahri also founded Big Sister, an independent film production company specialised in documentaries covering the politics, history and social dimensions of countries in the global South. With the aim of underlining and celebrating cultural diversity in the audio visual field, Big Sister is a platform for professionals coming from the South (in particular Africa and the Middle East), to help both veteran directors extend their body of work and support new talent coming from Europe, America and Africa.

Arwa Abouon

“Purify your eyes and see the pure world. Your life will fill with radiant forms.” Rumi

These words come to mind whenever I think of the late artist Arwa Abouon and her visual creations. My journey with Arwa began in 2014 when I invited her to take part in a collective exhibition called ‘Libyan Lamma’ in Malta; and, then later, in 2015 in London, when I curated a retrospective solo show for her, titled ‘Birthmark Theory’, at the London Print Studio.

Arwa’s creativity lies in her great ability to create visual compositions and imagery that transfer harmony, love and purity to the observer. She breaks down borders by portraying humanity and humility through the constant use of her family and multi-layered identity as a Muslim Libyan-Canadian woman. Her deep spirituality is always present in her photographic work, which in turn transmits beauty to the observer.

Constantly raising questions and answering them through her camera, the lens became a tool to speak and relay her deep thoughts, thus producing powerful images that reached out to the diverse spectrum of humanity. As she explained: “Through my lighthearted photographs to graphic intervention to video and installations, I question my own place within a so-called Western culture on the one hand and an upbringing in a Muslim household on the other. “

Arwa sadly left us abruptly last June 2020 and left behind a huge artistic legacy, that is a mystical ocean of beauty, poetry and purity. Her work is a testament to her light presence, her wonderful talent and quest to seek the beauty and meaning of life and faith in people.

Arwa once said: “My heart is a family home, a foundation that keeps my body together, a structure that no one could ever fully discover, because you have not seen the world through my eyes or feelings. The heart is a muscle and we are meant to keep it healthy so it could pump without interruption. I hope to

maintain a steady rhythm of Ba Boom (repeatedly) back home or wherever life takes me.”

Arwa’s unique approach has always been to use the motifs and symbols from her Islamic background and to juxtapose them with her Western-Canadian credentials. She creates pieces that reflect on what defines identity when one belongs to two different cultures. At the same time, she subverts any prejudices that may be held by outsiders regarding the same.

Qarm Qart

Qarm Qart - real name Carmine Cartolano - was born in 1972 in Salerno, Italy. An artist, writer and translator, he has been living in Cairo since 1999 where he also teaches Italian as a foreign language. He considers himself a very proud Cairene.

Qart: “An Italian living abroad is just like an Egyptian in Italy or a Pakistani in Dubai: a man far from the smells and flavors of his land and from his friends and family. He lives like a man enriched by the warmth of different families and by new experiences he would have never faced. The world today is a giant boule de neige. Even if you do not shake it, snowflakes continue to move, then settle and move on again.”

Mai Alshazly

Mai Al Shazly is an Egyptian visual artist, researcher and a ceramist based in Cairo, Egypt. Finding inspiration from archived objects, she creatively re-appropriates these to tackle identity, its relationship to the surrounding environment and political themes.

Within the historical context of the British colonisation of Egypt that lasted 74 years (from 1882 to 1954) and the export trade of certain items to the South, she uses the now iconic white earthenware as her material, comparing their continued reproduction in Egypt to a continued imperial mode of thinking.

Marcella Mameli Badi

Marcella Mameli Badi is an Italian ceramist currently based in London, England. Much of her artwork is rooted in Sardinian pottery traditions and the ancient wheel throwing techniques used by local craftsmen of the island. Although her ceramics are formed in slightly different ways, the influence is pretty evident

in her creations that have explored migrants’ journeys and the theme of displacement relative to the Mediterranean Sea and rewriting forgotten colonial histories.

Combo

Born in Amiens, France to a Lebanese / French father and a Moroccan mother. Combo's North African cultural roots mix with a European consciousness, gifting him with an unusual perspective that is reflected in his artwork. With this particular installation, he tackles the social and political environment, taking the observer into a space of familiar and unfamiliar iconography that reference the duality of the diasporic culture. With this work, also, he is exploring the issue of contemporary identity, that is driven by hyper consumerism and materialism.

Influenced by a fun pop art sense of humour with glimmers of cynicism, Combo acts as a public commentator who is rejoicing in his hybrid identity. In particular, he  likes to manipulate globally recognised consumerist objects that we can all relate to and share; and, then, allowing them to encompass a critical interplay between Western and non-Western culture. He then playfully pushes forward the maghrebisation of the Western brands to at once critique Western superiority, yet presenting their new added value when they are adopted by the local Arab market. 

Afsoon

Afsoon is an Iranian/British artist based in London, England. Her childhood was spent firstly in Iran and later in California, before she settled in the UK in 1988. Her nomadic life is very much reflected in her practice, where East merges with West, and she offers something simultaneously familiar and foreign. Unafraid to combine text and image, Afsoon uses multiple techniques, such as linocut, photography, collage and etching, in a single piece.

Although her art is deeply personal, it also resonates and speaks to the wider audience, bringing sophisticated humour and playfulness too. Afsoon’s work has been extensively exhibited worldwide and can be found in prominent collections and museums, including: the British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum, the Berger/YSL Collection, among others

Alla Abudabbus

Alla Abudabbus is originally a trained civil engineer with a keen passion for graphic design. Working mostly in the field of advertising and marketing as his day-to-day job, he has been the Director of the ‘Alalama’ marketing company in Tripoli and also founding the ‘Bridge Media and PR’ company. He is also a teacher at the Architectural Department at the University of Tripoli.

Recently Abudabbus has been experimenting with and producing a local strand of ‘pop’ art that is relevant to the Libyan contemporary cultural scene and contemplating its unique position within the global consumerist world. His colourful pieces reveal an ironic sense of humour and are full of underlying social commentary as well as mocking in jest aspects of the collective identity and state of mind.

His digitally manipulated creations feature recognisable Libyan figures with a reference to local tales or stories and mixing them with Western icons to bring about a juxtaposition of the diverse layers that make up the current Libyan persona.

Tewa Barnosa

Tewa Barnosa is the young talented Libyan artist whose work has caused quite a stir. She fuses Arabic calligraphy with different forms of mixed media; and, in much of her work, she utilises powerful newsworthy photos that refer to her home country, by writing over them with word messages to challenge the content of the stories told within.

Barnosa doesn’t shy away from the existential passage in which the Libyans find themselves in, addressing the difficult issues pertaining to the current state of political chaos, anarchy and general disorder. Her choice of the word is always engaging, be it splashed on the digital image or painted on her canvas. Whether she is tackling the dark themes of death, fear and war or looking at peace, love and dreams, she leaves her messages open to interpretation. In her ‘Lost’ piece, for example, she looks at the recent troublingly destruction of the Italian artefacts in Tripoli, with a photo of the Gazelle statue that was demolished by the attempts to deny colonial history.

Barnosa has offered a statement about her work: “Most of my works discuss the situation in the community that I live in. I have seen many acts and events happening and that are still taking place, especially in the past few years in Libya. I have tried to show the parts that I have experienced and felt through my artworks.”

Mohammad Bin Lamin

Mohammad Bin Lamin is a self-taught artist working with sculpture, digital art, photography and painting. Well-known and established in Libya, he uses signature paint methods the secret of which he keeps well under wraps.

Inspired by his country’s rich cultural and artistic heritage as well as the surreal identities it has had to endure over the millennia, some of his work references as far back as the ancient cave paintings found in the Southern mountains.

Bin Lamin’s colours, shapes and forms also draw upon Libya’s unique landscape, especially the Sahara desert, the Mediterranean Sea and the urban and rural fabrics of its towns and cities. One of his most celebrated paint series, for example, was the 'Yellow Beings' where one sees beautiful but deformed creatures stand out and tell the viewer a story of their own.

During the February 2011 Revolution, Bin Lamin was unfairly imprisoned for several months at the infamous Abu Salim prison. But undeterred, he began to draw on the walls of his cell and etching faces on silver tin foil. Later he would also create unusual and powerful sculptures made from bullets, shells and other recycled war material.

Yousef Fetis

Born in 1966 the Libyan artist Yousef Fetis graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tripoli where he later became an Arts teacher from 1997 to 2000. He also held the position of Director at the Art House in Tripoli for five years before he travelled and spent time in France - between 2000 to 2003 - where he researched the subject of the artistic interpretation of the human body.

Fetis’s paintings reflect a rich emotional and sensitive side. His images have a tremendous depth and his technique and choice of colours and textures always accentuate that depth. He is an artist in full control of his medium and confident with bold strokes and experimentations to bring out his feelings on canva

Hadia Gana

With a French-Libyan background, Hadia Gana studied Ceramics and Glass Making at the University of Tripoli and gained a Master’s in Ceramics from the University of Wales. She has taught Art at various levels ranging from primary school to higher education in Libya and has been awarded arts residencies at the Thami Mnyele Foundation in Amsterdam and as part of the Ashkal Alwan programme in Beirut.

In 2010 Gana also took part in the redesign of the Libyan Pavilion at the Shanghai Exposition, whilst the February 2011 Revolution saw her actively blog under the heading ‘40 Years of Running on the Same Spot: A Libyan Diary’. Her biggest and most ambitious project to date however is to complete the building of and open the ‘Ali Gana Museum’ in Tripoli, Libya in memory of her father who was also a well respected artist.

Within the inner circles, Gana is currently most famed for her installation art that tackles some of Libya’s difficult socio-political realities. Her ‘Zarda’ piece and the ‘Tripoli Pebbles’, for example, function as a form of social criticism yet they also manage to invite the audience to have a playful interaction that encourages further contemplation.

Using clay as primary material, she finds it reminiscent of childhood, when sand and water were favoured for games. Hadia also draws a strong parallel between the spiritual facets of clay and human beings, asserting how clay should be respected and treated in the same way. She further believes that as were born from clay, not from fire, that we are ordered to spread peace in the world.

Gana has taken part in many exhibitions and projects around the world, including in Libya, France, Malta, the UK and the Netherlands. Her most important project, as mentioned above, is the realisation of the ‘Ali Gana Museum’. The goal of this unique institution will be to provide a much needed workspace for artists and to implement art tuition as well as being a platform for discussions and cultural interaction.

Amado Alfadni

Amado Alfadni is a Sudanese-Egyptian artist born in 1976 in Cairo. His childhood was composed of two different environments: the Cairene street and the Sudanese home. The relationship and the tension between these two elements strongly influenced his view of both cultures; and, it made him question ‘Identity’ with its related rhetoric, as well as the variables of nation and ethnicity in his artwork.  

By working with forgotten historical events and referring to the current state of things, he challenges the power dynamics between the individual and authority on both the social and political levels. He gives a voice to the ethnic minor, with a focus on research and documentation of ignored happenings.

Utilising oral history that may be disregarded by the Western colonial tradition, his work lays a foundation for a post-colonial historical rewriting; and, it also discloses the possibility of a counter-discourse, a counter-knowledge, which make connections that are otherwise hidden.

Malak Elghuel

Malak El Ghuel is a versatile Libyan artist based in London, England. Predominantly utilising time-based media in the form of video art, she also turns to collage and screen printing. Her work tends to explore Libya’s specific culture and how to place that within the larger context of North Africa and the Middle East. The artist’s ongoing quest is to delve into notions of home and memory and to interlace the personal with the collective histories of the MENA region. Her work has been exhibited in Morocco, France, UK, Spain, Netherlands and UAE.

Marwa Benhalim

Marwa Benhalim is a Libyan/Egyptian artist and curator based in Cairo, Egypt. Her interdisciplinary practice employs language, popular culture and objects as tools to collapse and contentiously resist oppressive powers. With the Emirati artist Moza Almatrooshi, Benhalim co-founded Attempting Abla Nazira, a platform to engage with women working in the creative and service fields, by cooking and reflecting about food in relation to cultural production, gender politics and regional socio-economics.