Wael Shawky

EGYPT, 1971

In his installations, videos, photographs and performances, Alexandria based Wael Shawky tackles uncomfortable issues. His most recent work deals with the dichotomies and contradictions of social norms, primarily relating to culture and religion. Possessing an acute sense of the absurd, he raises questions about what is generally perceived as “normal” and “acceptable.” Within this context, Shawky has explored a variety of specific themes that are often rooted in regional issues yet have profound international relevance—themes such as modernization, cultural hybridization and marginalization.

“In most of my work I have been aiming to construct a hybridized society. A system of a society in transition, a condition that is not clear, a translation. I see my role as that of the translators—this translation is heightened the closer I come to a system of an actually existing society,” Shawky says.

Shawky’s videos such as The Forty Days Road (2007), Digital Church (2007) and The Cave (2004) bring to the fore contemporary clashes of civilization. The latter two present the artist reciting the Qur’an in incongruous circumstances—namely a European supermarket and a Catholic church. These films contain penetrating insights into history whilst being deliberately provocative. The resulting hybrid puts into sharp focus current global trends: attempts by the West to dominate desert cultures; commercialization and shifting economics; enforced development; and religious tensions in the modern world.

In his work The Greenland Circus (2005), Shawky uses the context of the circus, in particular its role as a container of “abnormal activity” and exhibitor of physical irregularities, to animate the symbolic role of freak-show entertainment used to attract and repel spectators’ appetites while also compelling their voyeurism. The video becomes an examination of what is and is not acceptable and how these lines and rules are ever-changing according to seemingly random and unregulated shifts in space and time.

28 William Wells

In his computer animation Al Aqsa Park, Wael Shawky shows the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount as a merrygo-round that has come off the rails and with its lights flashing is rotating around its own axis. Jews and Muslims claim this holy place equally, as it is a site where the histories of the three Abrahamic religions intersect. By staging one of the central symbols of Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an axis of a regulated entertainment industry, the artist investigates the complex interaction of politics and religion, religious ritual and medial distribution.1

1 Medium Religion. ZKM. http://www02.zkm.de/mediumreligion/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=100%3Awael-shawky&catid=34%3Akuenstlerliste&Itemid=5 3&lang=en