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Sabah Naim’s aim is to deconstruct
the daily experience. As visual entertainment, the works lure
us into a boundless adventure that examines both tangible reality
and fantasy world.
Meandering along streets with camera in hand,
she observes people too busy to notice her, anonymous faces
singled out in a sea of strangers. The more anonymous and obscure
a subject, the greater her fascination. She discreetly steals
these frames of life; sometimes caught by the subject Naim
nevertheless walks away with what she wants in her camera.
Naim’s work is very rooted in an Egyptian
sensibility. This is expressed in her use of textiles, colour
and embroidery. After printing in black and white on canvas,
she divides the image into different regions and then assigns
very distinctive tinting to her subjects and applies vivid
patterns to the environment. By using a variety of media and
techniques, from drawing to stitching her canvases, she forms
simple, often blanched sections that contrast softly with the
monochrome print.
While the anonymity of the Cairo streets
is her basic source of inspiration, the underlying poetic force
lies in Naim’s transformations of the mundane through
a manipulation of context and material. This compels the viewer
into making new associations through her idiosyncratic style.
Her works provide a visual insight into a complex debate: what
is reality and what is projection? Naim plays with this fine
line, separating person from place with unlikely colours and
shapes. In doing so she imbues these stolid characters with
her own life and identity - they become her creations.
In her multidisciplinary practice, Sabah
Naim proposes an alternative view of the urban experience;
one can sense a longing for authenticity and roots emerging
from her work. The exhibition is thus a collection of these
impromptu meetings between Naim’s camera and the teeming
humanity of the modern world, each work unveiling an identity
hitherto unknown and undefined.
Sabah Naim was born in 1967 in Cairo where
she lives and works. She studied at the College of Art in Cairo
where she focused on the human anatomy. Since then, she’s
has been under the tutelage of the famous Egyptian painter
Mohammed Abla.
Sabah Naim has presented her work in prestigious
international group exhibitions, among them the fiftieth Venice
Biennale in 2003, the Havana Biennial in Cuba in 2003, and
the touring exhibition Africa Remix, which has shown, among
other locations, at Moderna Museum in Stockholm in 2006, the
Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2006 and the Centre George Pompidou
in Paris in 2005. More recently, the artist participated in
the British Museum’s touring exhibition (London and Dubai) ‘Word
into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East’. |
