Her speech is nothing,

Yet the unshaped use of it doth move

The hearers to collection

Hamlet

Installation view of solo show at Townhouse Gallery, 2003

Amina Mansour’s Chapter 15: A Failed Contemporary Attempt at Being a Modern Day Ophelia is the latest installment in her series of works that tell the story of the restrained correspondences and maddening ruptures that are produced in the interaction between different cultural and historical worlds. Each chapter, or chapter set, is revealed at different times and in no particular order. But they are part of a sequential, interlinking series in a tale of wealth, gender, and nostalgia that spans two centuries and two continents. The tale is both personal and collective – an exploration of the two sides of Mansour’s family backgrounds as well as a recollection (and calling forth) of the troubled links between elite groups, and between the U.S. and Egypt.

For the artist, these chapters are likened to a set of monologues or a visual diary. In their sometimes tensely subdued, sometimes dramatic forms, they could also be parts in a romantic epic filled with the kind of passion and oppression that fills the pages of another epic which mixed cultures, genders, and classes and involved the American South – Gone With the Wind. Alternatively, the work may be likened to a play, especially when we consider its self-consciously narrative nature and the development of dramatic denouement. Indeed, the choice in Chapter 15 to use a character right out of Shakespeare – a master analyst of social mores and the explosive drama they can beget – is no accident. Although parts of the story have still not revealed themselves, we can begin to see the connections between the pieces and the general outline of pasts, histories, and futures.

Chapter 15 (Images 6-11)* opened at Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery in 2003, in an old and immense factory space which the artist had purposely lighted sparingly. The differences between this work and her previous show at that gallery (Chapters 1-5, Images 1-5) highlight the dichotomies and tensions inherent to the subject material that she is exploring. These beginning chapters were first exhibited in 1999 in one of the well-lit gallery rooms that had previously been a colonial era residential apartment. A major theme in these chapters was the restraint and domesticity that came with the cultivation of elite women in both the antebellum South and the 19th century Nile Delta – women linked through the arts of embroidery, weaving, and flower arranging, as well as through the international cotton trade and development of capitalism.

Yet even in these well-lit, seemingly blissful chapters, we see cues to the unbridled future that will unfold. Some of the seemingly meticulously constructed cotton flowers threaten to spin out of control. There is an interesting contrast between the fragility of the cotton forms and the solidity of the Vitrine. The Vitrine itself clearly references the Louis XV-style furniture so popular in the salons of the international elite class at a certain time, and that is still popular among many elites in Egypt today. While the activity in these salons was characterized by polite conversation and dainty china tea services, the furniture itself – as the Vitrine shows – was unbelievably extravagant in comparison to the simple furnishings of those people who did the labor that made these people so rich (e.g., slaves, sharecroppers, peasants). Even in this early chapter, Mansour gives us a glimpse of the underbelly of wealth. The legs of the Vitrine are modeled after muscular, laboring human legs, but they transform into the fancy nail-polished hands of an elite woman. Caught in both dominant and submissive positions, the woman of the landed gentry simultaneously directs the servants and holds up the house. Thus, this piece of furniture embodies the complicated power relationships between social classes, genders, and cultures – relationships that are often maintained through a system of oppressive restraint but that always threaten to explode beyond their accepted boundaries.

The explosion is on the verge of happening some ten chapters later in Chapter 15: A Failed Contemporary Attempt at Being a Modern Day Ophelia. Or perhaps it has just happened. We don’t know yet. But the tensions that were suggested in the earlier chapters become major, almost belligerent, contrasts here. Chapter 15 takes place in a massive, less contained space that once housed factory workers – the urban equivalent of the rural laborers who make a fleeting appearance in the earlier work. The artist darkened the space for the installation – a common method used in the theater during the major dramatic climax of a play, or at its ending. Spotlighting highlights some parts of the work while other areas are left in the dark. Here the furniture is a heavy, black, lacquered table. It does not have the quaint porcelain plaque of U.S. and Egyptian landowning families’ names or delicate gold leaf, like the Vitrine does. Rather, it is covered with a thick and imperious piece of bronze. The expensive material (a favorite among elite collectors of sculpture) is no longer ornate and delicate. It forms a hardened seascape that serves as Ophelia’s sacrificial bed (See Image 7). The elite woman’s hands have reappeared here, in an overlay of the personal and collective. This time they are the artist’s manicured hands digitally manipulated into forms that are dichotomously both delicate and submissive (see the hands in flight in Image 8), and grotesque and aggressive (see the swollen hands about to burst in Image 9). One critic has interpreted these forms as a direct expression of a previously tamed sexuality. The lyrical romanticism of the earlier chapters has been transformed into something verging on melodrama. The title of the work is even announced in a domineering and assertive way on one of the walls. The restrained speech of the earlier works has become “unshaped,” as the Gentleman in Hamlet says of Ophelia’s words.

Ophelia’s madness as referenced in this work can be seen as a metaphor for transgression out of the restrained female, elite spheres. But whereas literary critics have often read Ophelia’s transgression as primarily sexual (thereby linking female sexuality to insanity), in this work the transgression operates on multiple and more complicated levels. The sexual is certainly one of them. There is also material and class transgression. But most importantly, Ophelia’s madness results from the inevitable unraveling of the attempt to weave together two histories and cultures. To an extent, this weaving works in the realm of restraint (Chapters 1-5), where it is all about elite correspondences, and appearances. But it becomes explosive in other contexts – presumably those just prior to or after Chapter 15. The subject’s (or work’s) aggressive refusal to speak in the languages of patriarchy, of elitism, and of cultural boundedness breeds madness. The attempt to be a modern day Ophelia is, from the beginning, doomed to failure.

Much like a Shakespeare play whose meanings change with each retelling in a particular cultural location and historical moment, Mansour’s work reveals different correspondences and ruptures in each moment of its exhibition, viewing, and critical analysis. One wonders if this partially incomplete nature of the artist’s work is actually more enticing and evocative than it would be when and if the chapters are “completed.” For this is a continuously evolving story which resists, even as it pushes toward, compartmentalized definitions of people, place, and history. To complete it would be to let the story succeed, when the point is in the inherent failure.

*All images referred to in this essay correspond to ArteEast’s Virtual Gallery exhibition of Amina Mansour’s work.

For an especially interesting discussion of gender and history in these earlier chapters, see Kerstin Zurbrigg’s “Cultivating History” in Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, Spring/Summer 2001, p. 62-65. This essay is also reprinted on ArteEast’s Virtual Gallery website (www.arteeast.org).

Timothy Mitchell’s book Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (University of California Press, 2002) contains a brilliant analysis of the relationship between elites and the peasantry in Egypt, with particular attention to ways in which the country’s landowning families have capitalized on their wealth in the neoliberal era. The personal and collective histories Mansour is documenting in her work are found in this book.

It is perhaps apt that this factory once produced envelopes – a medium of business and communication across boundaries, and a medium that both encloses and is opened.

“Colonizing Fantasy in Pursuit of a Unifying Gene,” Basem el Barooni. Bidoun 1(1):15-18, Summer 2004.

Elaine Showalter has done an incisive reading of how the character of Ophelia has been problematically represented in art and literature over the centuries, as simultaneously secondary to Hamlet and as representative of the destructive effects of female sexuality (“Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” In William Shakespeare: Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).