LIMINAL SPACES
Since the beginning of photographic practices in the mid 19th century, there have been many photographic surveys made on Cairo’s monuments, streets, markets and inhabitants. By photographically documenting time that passes artists have revealed what elements of the city have remained timeless and what have been transformed.
The expansive metropolitan area of Modern Cairo has been the focus of major debates in both local and global, discussions around future environmental, economic, social and urban cross-disciplinary contexts over the last few decades. More recently, the extreme interventions and transformations that the city’s inhabitants have witnessed, such as the carving out of whole neighbourhoods to make way for high-speed transportation arteries, has been at the forefront.
One cannot live in or visit Cairo and not be aware of the peripheral highway system that encircles the metropolitan area connecting it to a variety of suburbs, otherwise known as the ring road. As of 2020 the Cairo Ring Road consisted of at least 110 km of multi-lane roads encircling most of Greater Cairo and the governorates of Qalyubiya and Giza. The New Administrative Capital, 45km east of Cairo, lies just beyond its outer ring. Begun in 1980 the purpose of the ring road was twofold: to manage Cairo’s debilitating traffic and to halt the rapid urbanisation of the city’s surrounding arable land. It has been argued that on both counts it has failed, the city’s population and hence urbanisation, growing too fast for it to be contained and controlled merely by steel and asphalt. Instead of restraining the city, the ring road is being consumed by it acting as a demarcation between the planned and unplanned, the formal and informal, the ‘what was supposed to be’ and the ‘what will come next’. It is this in-between, liminal space that both artists in the exhibition, Anthony Hamboussi and Amr Elkafrawy, explore.
The eight photographs by Hamboussi are from the series Cairo Ring Road, a photographic survey consisting of over 200 images that look at the city’s built environment from the vantage of the city's ring road. Made over a period of seven years Hamboussi began the series just two years before the Arab spring. Born in New York to Egyptian parents, Hamboussi’s return to Cairo in 2009 marked his first visit back since his childhood and set him on a path of questioning regarding his identity and belonging. As a photographer Hamboussi was always interested in the built environment and the unplanned city, an interest that can be seen in previous projects such as Ciudad Abierta, Ritoque, Chile (2001-2007), Newton Creek, NY (2001-2006), and La petite ceinture, Paris, France (2005). So it was only natural to him to look for answers amongst the vernacular landscape, “As I scanned the city for weeks on end, I was struck by the image of the brick city”, writes Hamboussi. “Realising the neighbourhoods I was drawn to were sha’aby made perfect sense since I’m interested in and feel connected to the working class, the under privileged, the marginalised. My own family comes from working class roots, from Mataraya and Shubra.”
The red brick that populate most of his images are the semi-finished, informal homes that have mushroomed around the city. Cement columns and steel rods protruding from the tops of each building signal the ‘what will come next’. The city that Hamboussi presents is one suspended in a moment of change, neither unfinished nor finished.
In Al Labeini Drain Road, Nazlet Al Batran, Al Haram, Giza Governorate, made in 2011, two empty roads cut across the bottom third of the image while a blue/white sky cuts across the top. In the middle stands a cement skeleton of a building surrounded by other partially finished structures. The palm trees to the left and right are a reminder that only recently this was all fertile farming land. In the centre background the peaks of two pyramids appear to grow out of the buildings themselves, the modern city being pushed to the boundaries of the ancient.
Hamboussi approaches his subject matter in a straightforward style such as those whose work has influenced him; photographers Joel Sternfeld, Thomas Struth, Michael Schmidt and Gabriel Basilico. Working with a large format camera, slow shutter speed and a muted palette Hamboussi has no desire to seduce but rather lay bare the truth. Where figures are visible they are small and dwarfed by the urban space. ”The people are not the protagonist,” says Hamboussi in an interview. “My work is not about the individual but about the collective experience, what the use of the land can tell us about the lives of the people who live there.”
Amr Elkafrawy’s long-time interest with the aesthetics of landscape and urban sprawl culminates in the two series The Ring Road (2018) and All Glamorize on the Eastern Side (2022) of which selected works are on display in this exhibition. Elkafrawy’s canvas-like pieces are made with layered segments of laser photocopied images on rough recycled paper. The layering gives a sense of repetition while the surface of the laser prints remains powdery, like charcoal, easily manipulated by Elkafrawy’s hand strokes and fingerprints that remain visible. As an Egyptian photo-based artist who first studied drawing, painting and graphic design, printing powdery images on paper physically and temporally mimics the cycle of destruction and construction he has witnessed in the city since 2011. Using photography’s power to document, Elkafrawy “can easily erase or add something to the surface later.” The Ring Road also has a philosophical aspect; the idea that it is a non-place and expresses non-time, which Elkafrawy further explains as “no-one wants the ring road; it is just a spatial and temporal tunnel.”
Both Hamboussi and Elkafrawy are deeply interested in the unseen pressures that dictate urban land use policies and the forces that shape the aesthetics and function of cities. Both their artistic practices look closely at specific landscapes on the verge of extinction or mutation, highly vulnerable to socio-political and economic changes, rendering the decision making mechanisms visible and traceable. The photographic images they produce are portraits of urban spaces in transition and in crisis.
For Elkafrawy, creating The Ring Road photo-based tableaus of the current state of urban areas is a reflection of how power structures have worked in Egypt since the 1950s. Complementing this project, the All Glamourize on the Eastern Side directly addresses the New Administrative Capital as it begins to appear out of the desert from the vantage of the ring road, with all its giant machinery, another sign of the power mechanisms that originally created the ring road.
Having later studied in Europe and Canada, the Dusseldorf School of Photography has been a major influence in Elkafrawy’s choice of lens and style. Responding in part to the concerns of the New Topographics movement in America, this school of photographic practice has been characterised by a straightforward, documentary quality of ‘topographic’ views of landscapes and a focus on cityscapes with a noticeable absence of the human figure. Artists such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer and Steven Shore, who studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher in the 1970s, rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s aided by the new technical capabilities of digital photography and printing. An identifying feature of this style of photography has been the combination of precise detail and monumental size giving the works an immersive quality, further blurring of the boundary between photography and painting.
The subject of Cairo’s ring road was also approached by British photographer Jason Larkin, known for his environmental portraits and landscape reportage. Both Larkin and Hamboussi’s works were exhibited and discussed within Cairo’s artistic and urbanist communities in presentations held at two art venues in downtown Cairo in the midst of the political eruptions of 20111 and 20152. Elkafrawy, also present in Egypt at the time and occupied by similar issues, had begun working on The Ring Road project as well.
What Hamboussi and Elkafrawy have in common is their shared desire to question the major interventions into the city's urban fabric they have witnessed with little or no public engagement or participation. Both are creating a new audience for a conceptual treatment of documentary photography that places images of a contemporary Egypt, an Egypt of liminal spaces in transition, at the forefront.
Heba Farid and Zein Khalifa
Cairo, June 2023
1. Larkin published Cairo Divided, a newspaper-style photographic essay exploring the city’s rapidly mutating urban landscape.
2. Hamboussi’s exhibition and talk was featured in the publication Surplus - Housing from the Periphery, another newspaper-style journal published by CairObserver’s editor and architectural historian Mohamed El Shahed.