With this poem by René Daumal, Nancy Hoffmann, art historian, curator and director starts the recount of the events and works that have so far made up the career of artist Amal Kenawy (Cairo, 1974). According to Hoffmann: “Kenawy has taught herself to speak again during the last seven years; she has developed a language of her own, a visual idiom conveyed in soft tones. Using words like ‘butterfly’, ‘wedding dress’, ‘rat’, ‘heart’, ‘tree’, ‘bed’, ‘child’, or ‘power pylon’, she creates sentences, visual fragments that are strung together by the elements of water, fire, earth and air. She repeats her words again and again with an exact cadence, not because she deliberately wants to be consistent, as people like to see in the art world, but to add force to her words. Her voice begins softly, warily, but grows in volume. … She constructs a world that visualises fragments of ideas, dreams, recollections and above all related emotions, which are as universal as they are personal…”
article by Nancy Hoffmann
