Staying the Course

Colin Pantall is a smart and very productive fellow who I will one day soon ask to link here. But this morning, his blog really messed me up. It introduced me to the work of Osama Esid who is. . . well let me just post part of this.

"The work of Osama Esid is a visual manifest of this relationship, investigating the social preconceptions and stereotypes that have been created on either side in the past, and which in some way still persist in our collective unconscious. The inquiry into "Orientalism", with its exotic and sensual connotations, from an artistic contemporary point of view generates a huge range of creative and theoretical possibilities which reveal the existing contradictions in the creation of clichés. The exhibition "A Play on Representation; The Egyptian Experiment" reopens the debate on these fundamental issues which unite East and West and which once so concerned Edward Said. . . .

[I]n the "Orientalism and Nostalgia" series, Esid reconstructs a theatrical period scenario but displaces it in full XXI century in one of the most important capitals of the region, Cairo. The aim of each piece is to acquire the atmosphere of those old vintage pictorialist photos, where beauty becomes the main protagonist. He highlights the more sensual side of Orientalism, referring to those essentially feminine spaces which also remind us of French XIX century painting. He retrieves the sensuality and eroticism in the gaze and enticing pose, although endowing his women with a defiant intensity, no longer passive and complacent, but on the contrary women who are in control of their bodies and their destinies.

By acknowledging beauty in this context, Osama Esid brings forth another representative twist, which is to try to modify the current widespread vision of his region, one characterised by images of war, terrorism and fundamentalism."

As I wrote to Pantall's blog this morning, creativity is most profound when it is challenging the coherence of pervasive views, especially as it is formed by the second and/or third waves of an ideology.

Too often, I am weak and give up. Seeing Esid's work and the attention given to it this morning just about broke my heart. I must work harder and with more confidence. Damn the torpedos.