YOUSSEF NABIL
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Note : Youssef Nabil grew up in Cairo that treasured the golden age of Egyptian cinema and that echoed with the tunes of the heyday of Egyptian music. Enchanted by the irresistible charm of this bygone era, and by the hand-painted, Technicolor posters and pictures of this time, Nabil's photographic oeuvre has been largely influenced by its visuals. Youssef Nabil's profound appreciation of the centrality of this time and of its memory to contemporary Egyptian culture has led him to recreate scenes inspired by classic Egyptian cinema filled with glamour, elegance and melodrama. Through a sensitive yet twisted nostalgic approach, Nabil lovingly stages overly theatrical compositions of made-up and costumed women who hold gripping poses and intense expressions in dramatically lit, studio-produced settings. In keeping with the traditions of the imager of this period, the artist delicately hand-tints the resulting black and white photographs which then become somewhere between being pictures, paintings, cinematic moments and essays on the artist's invariable concerns.Breaking free from the practices of conventional portraiture, this part of Nabil's portrait oeuvre does not actually depict his sitters for who they really are. Instead, Nabil's sitters are a pure product of his imagination; they inhabit the world of his dreams and fantasies. But Nabil's images exude an artificiality that is all too betrayed by the ghostliness of his belles. In fact, what Nabil is grasping is an idea, an essence, and a memory of a person and a time that once was. It is his fear of death, finality, and forgetting that drives him to create such carefully studied, romantic scenes, scenes which are meant to immortalize the moment that they depict and freeze in time his femme fatales and what they stand for. In this repertoire of cinema-inspired images, a variety of characters are born, re-born, or, more accurately, kept alive. And it is through this resuscitation of semi-fictitious, semi-real people for fear of their disappearance that Youssef Nabil ponders his relationship to Cairo and Egypt both present and past, Cairo's relationship to its previous, more glamorous self, in addition to other more universal questions about life, death, memory, alienation and the dustbin of history. Natacha Sleeping, Cairo 2000 is the depiction of the singer Natacha Atlas, dressed in a belly dancer costume, lying on a bed of silk cushions and spreads; adorned with jewels. In her relaxed pose, she appears to be deep in her dreams in a fairy tale setting. A synthesis of the Sleeping Beauty and the Arabian Nights, Natacha is more like a still from Nabil's fantasy world, a heroine trapped in the story. With the addition of his antique hand-colouring Youssef's photographs become lyrical constructs, appealing on a level that is both beautiful and conflicting and inhabiting a sense of the enigmatic.
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