Abstract
Amal Kenawy's career centred on her body in order to explore power, violence, and the psyche through dreamlike, symbolic works. Addressing embodied experience and gendered violence, she connected personal trauma to Egypt's volatile socio-political climate preceding the 2011 uprising. Kenawy was a pivotal figure in Egypt's independent art scene (late 1990s–2011), employing an intermedial approach combining painting, installation, performance, and film, often creating multiple iterations of projects. Notable works like The Room and the controversial The Silence of the Lambs (2009) highlighted social hierarchies and anticipated collective unrest. Educated in fashion and fine arts but emphasising self-guided learning, she collaborated early with her brother before developing her distinct solo practice. Despite her untimely death at 37 from leukemia, Kenawy's legacy, documented mainly through performative archives, remains significant.
Biography
Amal Kenawy’s brief but formidable career centred her own body on exploring the effects of social and interpersonal power and violence on the human psyche. Staging dreamlike scenes populated with a personal symbology, Kenawy’s work engages fearlessly with themes of embodied experience and gendered violence even as she rejected the feminist label. She argued that her work aimed to transcend the personal to speak to the complex context of Egypt’s volatile political and social conditions on the threshold of the popular uprising that erupted in 2011. The wedding dress, the beating heart, the moulting tree, hair and thread, vermin devouring the body, and axonometric illustrations of a room are all motifs that reappear across multiple works. Similarly, specific gerundive actions define many of her works, one action segueing into the other in fluid succession. These include pupal growth and the shedding of a chrysalis-like garment, decaying flesh and decomposition, futile stitching and circling, dilating light, freezing and conflagration.
Despite her untimely death at the age of 37, Kenawy played a key role in the development of the contemporary art scene in Egypt between the late 1990s and 2011: a period marked by the emergence of an independent art scene, outside the aegis of the state-run cultural sector. Her practice was capaciously intermedial, consistently combining painting, installation, performance, sculpture, drawing, film, and animation at a moment at which very few artists in Egypt took this approach and arts curricula eschewed time-based media and practices. Kenawy regularly produced multiple iterations of a single project in response to changing conditions of display and performance, creating works that escape facile categorisation by media or genre.
Throughout her brief career, Kenawy navigated growing antagonism from state-run arts institutions directed at an emerging generation of artists who oriented their practices towards international rather than national horizons. She was vocal in criticising the state’s role in limiting artists’ opportunities in Egypt and quashing creativity. At the same time, Kenawy was critical of the proliferation of exhibitions outside of Egypt that imposed generic frameworks of ethnic, religious, or gender identity on participating artists. Instead, she sought to establish her terms of engagement in a period when European and American arts professionals and institutions embraced an increasingly global model of the art world while continuing to situate non-Western artists at its periphery.
An early childhood fascination with design and dressmaking placed Kenawy on the path to creative practice. She studied fashion design and filmmaking at the Higher Institute of Cinema (al-Ma‘ahad al-‘Aly li-l-Sinima) in Giza between 1997 and 1999. She received a BA from the Department of Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts (Kulliyat al-Funun al-Jamila) at Helwan University in Cairo in 1999. Years later, reflecting on the education she received at these institutions, Kenawy derided the programs' overall academic nature and their diminishment of applied practice. Her education, she claimed, was self-guided and ran parallel to the institutional training she had received.
Kenawy’s first mature works—eleven pieces created between 1997 and 2002—were produced in collaboration with her older brother, Abdel Ghany Kenawy (b. 1968). Kenawy described this creative partnership as foundational to her practice; she and her brother partnered on all production stages, from conception to fabrication. Their father owned a metal casting factory used to manufacturing weapons for the Egyptian military, which instilled an acute sensitivity to detail and technical precision in the siblings. Works produced in this period include Transformations (1998), The Body (2000), and Frozen Memory (2002). Transformations was composed of a human-scaled metal tube that drew the visitor into a fabric chamber in which a block of ice rested on an ice-making machine, its surface covered in a bed of clay. The ice-making machine turned on and off intermittently, causing the block to change state: melting, releasing condensation, refreezing, and forming ice crystals. The machine's hum and accompanying temperature changes in the chamber contributed to the immersive environment.
The video installation Frozen Memory was the final work that the siblings produced collaboratively, although Kenawy’s brother continued to provide support for her subsequent projects. The video presented a stream of images and objects related to birth, marriage and death enclosed in a block of ice. According to the artist, the work “was an extension of the subjects [she and her brother had] previously dealt with, but it took a small step in a more intimate direction.” Following this, Kenawy decided to work alone and explore an increasingly personal perspective.
The first work Kenawy created in this vein was titled The Room (2002). Her 2007 performance of The Room at Darat al-Funun in Amman combined live performance with a video projection and an accompanying audio track. The video featured a stream of dreamlike imagery, including a scene of hands in white lace gloves sewing false pearls and flowers onto a fleshy heart that appears to beat independent of a body. Next to the projection, the artist sat on a stool, stitching a wedding dress mounted on a metal frame and lit internally with a lightbulb. In its earliest iteration, the wedding dress also trapped moths that circled futilely around the lit bulb. A performance of the piece from 2006 ended with the artist setting the dress alight.
You Will be Killed (2006), created following the artist’s cancer diagnosis, features a video animation in which an image of the artist’s face appears as if postmortem. The latter serves as a jarring, if static ground to a stream of nightmarish images of transformation, especially growth and death, and featuring many of the familiar motifs found in many of her works including rooms, beds, bodies, trees, rats, butterflies, and dripping, blood-like purple fluid.
In a video of Non-Stop Conversation (2007), a performance and installation commissioned for the 8th Sharjah Biennial, the artist can be seen stitching a modest, dilapidated structure into a suit of glossy pink padded quilts; sounds of construction are audible in the background; Kenawy stops to speak about the project to curious children passing by. The bubblegum pink color and silky, cushioned skin of the fabric transformed the skeletal ruins of the home of a certain Sheikh Ghaloum Abbas al-Ansari overlooking Sharjah’s corniche into a fantastical sculpture in the process of becoming or undoing: evocative of its past life or the domestic space it had formerly housed, as well as drawing attention to its transitive state of partial ruin.
Kenawy’s best known piece is a performance titled The Silence of the Lambs (alsoThe Silence of the Sheep) (2009), created initially to mark the opening and closing (the latter never took place) of a 2009 exhibition titled Assume the Position curated by Nikki Columbus and hosted at the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cairo. The work played on the metaphor of the masses as sheep obediently following their leaders without any idea (or hope) of autonomous or critical thought and action. In video documentation of the performance shot on a handheld camera, the artist can be seen shepherding a group of volunteers and paid participants—including her brother and staff members of the gallery, alongside day labourers from the neighbourhood—who crawl on their hands and knees through the chaotic streets of downtown Cairo. The spectacle watched by people on the street and exhibition visitors acted as a match, catching light performance was soon interrupted by bystanders infuriated by what they saw as the exploitation of those who couldn’t afford to turn down the money they received to participate. Eventually, the artist and performers were taken to a nearby police station and held overnight. The spectacle of the performance momentarily laid bare the acute class and gender hierarchies animating public space and social life in a moment of heightened tension, anticipating the eruption of collective grievances into the public sphere in 2011, as well as the transformation of public spaces in downtown Cairo into sites of political and social contest. A version of the work appeared next in the 12th Cairo International Biennale, where it was awarded the Grand Prize. This iteration of the piece included video documentation of the performance, as well as a new accompanying performance. In the latter, the artist and her young son prepared and served food to Biennale visitors, offering a pendant of sociability and collectivity to the divisive performance in downtown Cairo.
