IBRAHIM AHMED
Burn What Needs To Be Burned
December 1, 2018 > January 19, 2019
z2o Sara Zanin Gallery is pleased to host from December 1st to January 19th Burn What Needs To Be Burned, artist Ibrahim Ahmed’s debut exhibition at the gallery. Displaying the result of a two-year long self-exploration and internalised dialogue, the artist takes a view on the urgent debate about masculinity and its implications, at a time when this has come into focus as an issue. The exhibition shows his personal process of understanding and dismantling of manliness as a construct, as it is perceived and performed across different geographical and cultural collective imaginations.
The show comprises around fifty photos and photo-collages in which the artist exposes and manipulates his own body as a battleground protagonist.
Born to Egyptian parents living in Kuwait in 1984, Ibrahim Ahmed spent his childhood between Bahrain and Egypt before moving to the US at the age of thirteen. In 2014, he relocated to Cairo, where he currently lives and works in the informal neighbourhood of Ard El Lewa. Not tied to a specific geographical place and national identity, he moves within a composite realm of ‘belonging’. This awareness largely influences his practice and offers him a peculiar vantage point. Throughout his career, he has addressed global subjects related to colonisation, structures of power, cultural interactions and fluid identity, challenging the rigid binary-based societal categorization.
In Burn What Needs to Be Burned, Ahmed pushes himself and his audience to reconsider our mind-set about masculinity and to accept the provocation: What narrative do societies create about men, and what does this imply? What oppressive systems of power are being (un)consciously perpetuated through the ‘real man’ discourse?
The exhibition reflects Ahmed’s rite of passage.
The trigger is The Things I Hope To Bury, a black and white half-length photo portrait of the artist wearing only a metal mask made of re-assembled car parts. Masks are an essential element in various African cultures, and they often represent a mythological being that possesses the wearer. Powerful cars and motors recall male performativity and play a central role in the construction of the ‘real man culture’. The mask is a symbol for the hierarchical dynamics established between man and masculinity. This relationship creates an apparently stronger identity but simultaneously generates a structure of constrictions suffocating one’s own individuality.
I Break the Promise I Made From His Tongue and Piece By Piece I Shield the Fractured Flesh I Own explore the genesis and the consequences of the male dominance rhetoric on the artist’s life. He investigates the indoctrination of his father, questioning the masculine model that allured him. Influenced by the American idea of performative masculinity, his father claimed these male traits to please his new home country, fitting into the grid of the stereotypical ‘real man’. Educated according to that model, Ahmed clashes with its perils. Caught in a spiral and exposed to different masculine standards, he wonders how much of himself was lost within these unnatural roles. In the two collage series, the mask becomes more complex and distorted. The cut-outs of car parts merge with those of architectural elements, in an amalgamation of symbols of power. Often considered as a cultural icon, architecture is historically a male-dominated realm, where the etymological ‘archi’ (meaning authority, leading rule and principle) has long been controlled by men. The parts of the buildings act as a metonymy for monolithic constructs and structures of containment. The faces of the subjects disappear behind this cage, suggesting the absence of self-expression.
The hyper-masculine deity of I Am Hollowed Where I Once Was results from this personal tumult. In a studio in Ard El Lewa, Ahmed was photographed posturing in various interpretations of masculinity. These poses are based on statues from Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, mannequins within the area, and local studio photos of young men. In the collages, the artist mines the Greco-Roman blueprint of masculinity. He appears god-like embodying a cultural interpretation of gender. Made of entangled muscular tensions, physical power, strength and sexual postures, it is the celebration of a performative alien born from the deconstruction of the original image – or rather, self. This grotesque super-ego reflects what the artist defines as ‘colonial masculinity’, which interprets manliness as aggressive and exerting power over others. The remnant cut-outs converge into I Hear It. Telling Me To Show Myself, where the excavated, empty body reflects what survives when masculinity is created at the expense of the individual self.
Bring The Offering and Alms I Left At Your Doorstep and What Comes After. Bring Peace To This Restlessness are a climax of the tensions between hyper-masculinity and the self. The first series of collaged photos documents a performance that took place at the artist’s studio. Here, Ahmed grapples and wrestles with a cement block used in Ard El Lewa to claim parking spots. The vivid visual language of the block is a metaphor of the weight of masculinity and the exhausting role-play. The second series offers a private perspective of the same performance, placing the focus on the internalised struggle and emotionality of the artist.
The door opens on a crossroads. Will we bear the block forever? Will we find the courage to drop the mask? In Everything I Am. Everything I Am Not the artist collages and layers photos in which he posed without assuming any masculine postures and allowing himself to be read ‘effeminate’. When assembled, the various body parts reveal a new, more intimate picture where tensions and constrictions have disappeared. As in Chinese philosophy of yin and yang, masculine and feminine are contrary forces that interrelate to one another, and generate inner peace when embraced.
Burn What Needs To Be Burned rotates around a precise keystone. The body as a theatre for enacting power dynamics is the leitmotiv of Ahmed’s visual language. True masculinity is largely associated to men’s bodies, often described with the metaphor of the ‘machine’ and constructed according to the expectations of the social press. Manliness entails certain muscular shapes, tensions, postures and ways of moving, and consequently possibilities in sex. These beliefs are a strategic part of modern gender ideologies, where the politics of body are connected to the politics of gender and gender powers on a larger social scale.
The exhibition speaks to the audience, but also about the audience. Moving from a personal act of meditation, it makes visible the ways in which we are held in place by a cultural repertoire of masculine behaviours, and how this repertoire has implications on micro and macro levels. It opens up uncomfortable questions that in an unexpected way undermine the philosophies of the world we live in and demand our responsibility not to avert our own gaze.
Flavia Malusardi
