Hamdi Attia

5

EGYPT/UNITED STATES, 1964

Mistranslating the Untranslatable

Hamdi Attia’s latest work can be read as a detailed study of the social and political implications inherent in the act of translation. In Two Performances (2006), he confronts seemingly opposing, but equally authoritative, cultural and political translations of the world by juxtaposing two influential cultural translators: Thomas Friedman, “the prophet of neoliberalism”1 and Amr Khaled, “the Arab echo of neoliberal ideas after Islamicizing them.”2 Friedman translates the world for numerous ordinary American readers while Khaled does the same for many upper-middle-class men and women in Egypt.

While showing Friedman and Khaled’s authority and influence, Two Performances demonstrates how similar their simplistic logic is. By splitting the screen into two windows, one showing either Khaled or Friedman, the other showing the audience and/or commercials (e.g., Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Attia questions this authority and makes them look like television entertainers. They are almost clownish figures, with Friedman repeating the same joke ad nauseam, and Khaled employing naïve logic to reach his audience. Both Friedman and Khaled become performers of clichéd discourses that translate the world into a binary of “us” versus “them”: America versus the rest of the world for Friedman; Islam versus the West for Khaled.

Hamdi Attia uses preexisting materials, mainly footage from the Internet and commercials, reassembles them, puts them in unexpected contexts, and comments on them by editing them, arranging them in a particular order, and inserting intentionally mistranslated subtitles. He plays with appropriated narratives, with those who are considered some of its most popular figures.

Faced with, and freed by, the untranslatability of life, of the world, of the “real,” artists and writers are left with already existing translations to work on, play with, distort and question. This is especially so in a neocolonial world where cultural translations (the interpretation of the other as backward or of entire regions as lawless) are used–as they have always been used–to legitimize empire-building, oppression and dehumanization. In such a climate, writers and artists like Attia are acutely aware of the process through which the world is rendered in art and literature, as well as in various political and religious discourses.

Attia, who grew up in Egypt and was one of the leading young artists in the Egyptian art scene of the early 1990s, belongs to a generation of Egyptian writers and artists known as “the generation of the ’90s.” Attia’s relocation to the United States seems to have prompted a closer examination of the

1 Limoud, Youssef. “Between Thomas Friedman and Amr Khaled … An Interview with artist Hamdi Attia.” [in Arabic] http://www.rezgar.com/debat/show.art.asp?aid=77188 All translations from Arabic are mine. 2 Ibid

social and political significance of cultural translations. Like many recent immigrants to the U.S., Attia was certainly faced with the all-too-familiar issues confronting such marginalized people, including the pressing need to translate oneself to a different, and often hostile, context, and the urge to contest existing translations that tend to stereotype everything foreign.

Waiel Ashry