Huda Lutfi: Evoking Cultural Complexities

Collage cutouts conjuring up fantasies and fears

Huda Lutfi, Imagining the City (2016). Courtesy of the artist and the Third Line.

With text by Nabila Abdel Nabi, art historian.

A cultural historian by training. Huda Lutfi’s practice since the early 1990s has constituted an archival process of scouring, collecting and embedding found material into her work. Lutfi has been excavating and reconstructing narratives about the urban fabric of Cairo for much of her artistic career. Through her acts of historical layering, Lutfi activates objects, as cultural artifacts, to speak to us about the past and the future in this way, she reactivates the cultural memory of objects and people that have been wrestled, neglected or discarded from history. Her work often juxtaposes Pharaonic, Islamic, Coptic and Mediterranean visual iconography.

Photography features prominently in her latest work, in which Lutfi continues her technique of collaging cutouts from newspapers, advertisements and, most recently, personal documents. The impulse to incorporate her own photography was catalyzed during the 2011 revolution in Egypt, when Huda felt the urgency to record pivotal figures, and moments in the uprisings. Her recurrent engagement with dolls, arguably the Surrealists’ object of choice, continues in this series, which highlights the figure of the mannequin as a ubiquitous feature in the Cairene cityscape. “Perhaps this is my attempt to escape from the politics of the city and, more importantly, to explore and document this obsession with mannequins- what may be veritably called a Mannequin obsession or fetishization – in the popular culture of the market,” Lutfi suggests. In works such as The city goes pop the mannequins operate as the protagonists in the social dynamics of the city. Guy Debord’s message in his seminal work the Society of the Spectacle that, “all that was once directly lived has become mere representation” is wrought here on Lutfi’s canvas with refreshing vigor. Repetition features powerfully, both as a technique and a formal trope in the collages. The use of the infinitely reproducible medium of photography to document the mass-produced object of the doll produces an affective doubling which comes as both a lament and a warning.

Various threads emerge which tie into Lutfi’s previous engagement with dolls, but what strikes one about these new works is the sense of the teeming, spilling, march of multitudes through the city. Yet here Lutfi suggests that relations between commodities have ultimately supplanted the relations between people. The mannequins looming over the city metonymically refer to the lumping together and eventual loss of identity, which occurs through commodity fetishization becoming increasingly symptomatic of our globalized condition. Fearful of the notion that “plastic dolls made in China seem to have taken precedence over the Mulid doll,” Huda points to the creative tradition as a casualty of mass production. This opens up into the multi-faceted nature of dolls- as objects upon which to project parallel lives, or create alternate universes Lutfi presents us with a psychogeography of the city as a system of illusions.

Working largely with images of Cairo’s downtown district, Lutfi aggregates them in order to reveal layers of the city in a mode that suggests an archeological cross-section. Her cityscapes possess the quality of a palimpsest, where time and space are condensed, yet can spit out all the idiosyncrasies and impossibilities of the urban fabric simultaneously. “In manipulating the photographed images, I continuously fabricate, multiply and reconstitute these lifelike objects, conjuring up fantasies, desires and fears in material form. The political however, seems to return, this time popping up in ambiguous and discrete forms, parodying the politics of a failed state of things,” Lutfi explains. An ‘urban archaeologist’ and cultural bricoleur, the process of utilizing, appropriating and reconfiguring found objects allows her to create alternative frameworks of interpretation- part fantasy, part documentation. Her inclusion of photography continues to make Lutfi’s work truly contemporary in the way it indexes the present moment in Egypt’s visual culture, while intertwining it with the past- an apt metaphor for our current artistic landscape.