Reading 4: Gerald Matt on Amal Kenawy

Matt, Gerald. “Amal Kenawy.” Ed. Gerland Matt. Vienna: Kunstalle Wein, 2008. 134-144. Print

Amal Kenawy is an artist who lives and works in Cairo. She works in many mediums but the work discussed in this article is performance, video and installation.

Gerald Matt is a curator and the current director of Kunstalle Wein in Vienna. He specialises in interviews with prominent artist and comes from a law, business and art history academic background.

During the interview with Gerald Matt Kenawy is questioned on the influence her gender has on her artistic practice and the relationship between her artwork and the artwork of feminist artists Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Charlotte Scheeman.

Kenawy replies that any feminist content in her works is not conscious. She concedes that her emotional engagement with an experience is tempered by the values that her society has given its women. In this sense her identity as a woman alters the way she responds to and interprets an experience and this is evident in her work. Kenawy feels that she is often grouped with the above artists for two reasons. The first is their use of similar symbolism. The second is the simple fact that they are women (Matt 135-136).

In June 2009 Kenawy’s “Tomorrow You Will Be Killed” featured in the traveling exhibition Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art curated by Randy Jane Rosenberg of Art Works For Change. By positioning herself in this feminist political context, Kenawy encourages a feminist critic. How can she not be conscious of the effects this positioning has on the content of her artwork?

In the article “Feminism: Three Views” by Jennifer Doyle, Gilane Tawadros and N’Gone Fall, Doyle explains that one can have feminist content in their work, but still not consider themself to be a feminist (Doyle 3) Perhaps this is the case in Kenawy’s work.

Tawadros points out that it seems that the artist has two options: They can deny the impact of their identity on the content of their work, or let their work be categorised by their identity (Paragraph 2 p.4). But Kenawy seems to reach some kind of middle ground by qualifying her rejection of “feminist artist” as an identity by saying that “gender may be said to play an indirect and unconscious role in my work…” (Matt 135-136). I think this reflexivity separates her somewhat from her categorisation as a feminist artist as she does not see it as her foremost critical concern.

References
Exhibitions Art Works for Change. Web. 2 June 2010 http://www.artworksforchange.org/exhibitions_moo.htm

Doyle, J., Fall, N. & Tawadros, G. “Feminism: Three Views” Frieze April 4 2007. Web. 2 June 2010