25.10.08

YUSSEF NABIL

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Yussef Nabil (Αίγυπτος)

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erva_cidreira είπε...

Yussef Nabil
Born in Cairo in 1972, Youssef Nabil has always been fascinated with the glamour and style of early Egyptian cinema, the black and white photo-novels published at the time and the hand-coloured family portraits that still adorn most living rooms in Cairo. He started taking pictures after being rejected by the Institute of Cinema in Cairo and used his friends to stage scenes which he would ideally liked to have filmed. These early images set the stage for all his subsequent work which was further influenced by his close friendship with the legendary Egyptian-Armenian photographer Van Leo. Van Leo is celebrated for his glamorous studio portraits of famous Egyptian actresses of the 1950s and 60s and Nabil spent many hours watching him at work in his studio. While working as a photographers’ assistant in prominent studios New York and Paris in the 1990s, he started producing his staged, constructed and meticulously hand-coloured black and white portraits of celebrities, close friends and fellow artists such as John Waters, Shirin Neshat, Tracey Emin and Ghada Amer.

Nabil tells 'stories' through his carefully constructed images. In his words: "I always like to tell stories through my work; the more simple the photo is, the more complicated the story becomes. What's the point in making a photo if it doesn't have something to say?" Nabil's images have a cinematic quality and explore the interior and exterior worlds of drama, beauty, glamour, sexuality and identity. In his latest body of work titled Sleep in My Arms, Nabil gives us access to stories about his relationships with various male friends through his delicately coloured, quiet and intimate portraits. A voyeur by nature, Nabil places these young men in situations of his own imagining and sets up dreamlike moments that are imbued with a brooding sexuality.

22 Οκτωβρίου, 2008 16:56
erva_cidreira είπε...

In Youssef Nabil's hand-coloured photographs, time is no longer a certainty. Images in is latest show 'Sleep in my arms' embrace an aesthetic of a bygone era and visualise the inherent paradox of the photographic image - a forever current record of an already-past event.
There is also a sense of nostalgia about the work. Not sentimental and uncritical feeling for the past, referring instead particularly to the Greek root of the word which translates as both a 'return home' and 'pain'. Nostalgia's 'pain' is the fact that, try as we might, we cannot return to a specific time, or a specific feeling.
As Michael Stevenson notes in his essay Not as they seem, 'Nabil's imagery shifts the way we see our world, the facets we tend to set aside in the open light of day... The realms of sleep and of intimacy, particularly between men, are rarely acknowledged in Western art practice' and nor is the male nude 'portrayed quietly on its own terms...Nabil's nudes are considered and conscious, even though they appear passive. In his studies he alters our perception of a space and a realm where we spend the greater part of our lives, yet generally ignore once we wake'.

22 Οκτωβρίου, 2008 16:57

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