Moataz Nasr: Cairo Walk
The moments that make up the life of the city
Moataz Nasr, Cairo walk (2006-2013). Courtesy of Leila Heller Gallery and Galleria Continua.
With text by Dr. Shiva Balaghi, scholar and curator.
For the past thirty years, the artist Moataz Nasr has been taking regular walks through Ola Cairo. Some Friday mornings, he joins an informal group of scholars, writers, artists and journalists who meet at a downtown safe for a walking tour of the old neighborhoods. I ask Lee Keath, a journalist for the Associated Press, who is a regular at these walks to describe what they entail. ‘It’s a lot of noticing of details, like an Art Deco flourish on a façade or a door; how something newer has been built in and round something ancient; how people are using and reusing old things,’ Heath explained. ‘It’s an extremely layered urban landscape.’
This sensibility, this attention to the shifting urban landscape of Cairo, is threaded throughout. Nasr’s body of work. ‘In my art,’ he tells me, ‘you can see how much I love this city, how much I want to learn about it.’ Speaking with the curator and critic Hou Hanru in Rome in 2014, Nasr explained, ‘It wasn’t only about visiting museums or art scenes. If you are talking about my personal history, art is in everything around me . I was fascinated by the ancient Egyptian monuments that were everywhere; they were spread around the city the way billboards are now. The weather, the greenery, the Nile and even the people…were all very influential.’
In an ongoing photographic series, Cairo Walks, Nasr captures moments and details that make up the life of a city. The everyday mingles with the extraordinary; ancient architectural details mix with bright colored wares in the bazaar; light filters through the mashrabiya; a stucco wall painted with an advertisement is peeling away. The city is deeply embedded in Nasr’s way of life and by extension his art.
‘Cairo,’ he tells me, ‘is a city of contradictions. Everything is yes, and everything is no. Everything is rejected, and everything is accepted.’ But Nasr takes what Cairo offers and translates it into a universal language. ‘I am an artist from Egypt, rather than an Egyptian artist,’ he explains. ‘That is an important distinction. The whole world is my village. Travel connects me to many places. First and foremost, I am an artist.’