Werke von Mohamed Abouelnaga

Under the Ptolemies, the production of papyrus sheets, a precursor of paper, had been an Egyptian monopoly and the country's primary industry. In the 1960s, Dr. Ragab dreamt of re-inventing the technique of papyrus making. Having benefited from his acquaintance with Asian paper techniques during his appointment as the first ambassador tochina, Dr. Ragab set up a papermaking laboratory on the Nile shores in Cairo. In a short time, his papyrus production became a huge
commercial success. Now an institute, Dr. Ragab's houseboat provided facilities to resident artists, whose experiments, witha rang of handmade papers created with Egyptian and Asian flora,have contributed to propagating this art from across the country.

A Japanese myth attributes the invention of paper to a goddess who gifted the secret of its fabrication to mankind. This divine origin, a tribute to its function as tool for recording ides through the art of calligraphy, was also singled out for its sensitivity. Paper pulp can be made to respond to touch water stains, pressure, or inlay. Rigid or soft, it adapts to cutting or plying in any shape or casting in any form.

The artist Mohammed Abouelnaga studied papermaking extensively in Egypt and Japan; it is a medium which proved particularly appropriate to his communicative and warm personality. This artist succeeds in by passing
the aesthetic appeal of his craft and converts its properties
into The domain of ideas by conceptualizing the medium in installations which
generated great interest due to the resurgence of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
The decorative effects of his installations were toned down in Altars for other Sacrifices, a very sober presentation featuring lithographic prints and sculptures
of cast paper inspired by steals, which, unlike ancient ones, preserved a natural history through the inlaid traces of organic matter

Abouelnaga's medium was especially pertinent in the context of an instillation
entitled 451F (2001), where the life and death of ideas were explored in an actual Live Environment. This work, heavily inspired by Fahrenheit 451, the1966 film adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel of the same name, consisted of burnet books and newspaper bundles, which he displayed among the latest publications
on the shelves of a popular downtown Bookstore. One row of burnet books, or deleted ideas, one row of authorized bookseller's merchandise. This installation, which multiplied the implications of book burning to actuality, was carried into
the street by way of partially burnt and shredded banners, where section of slogans and poems scribbled in Arabic went missing due to the destructive power of a firetouch. The title of the original Bradbury novel came from the temperature at which book paper stars to burn, and the film adaptation was a futuristic tale of a society where all printed material is banned and dispensed by the government to pacify its citizen.

Lileyan Karnok

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