Amal Kenawy

• Name — Amal Kenawy • Born — 1974 • Birthplace — Cairo • Died — 19 August 2012 • Website — amal-kenawy.com

Amal Kenawy was born in 1974 in Cairo, Egypt. She showed an interest in film, art and fashion design from an early age. In her childhood, Amal used to make her own clothes from any fabric she could find. Her parents struggled financially and Amal was the youngest of four children. Her artistic studies began at the Egypt Cinema Institute. In 1999 she received her undergraduate degree in painting, from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Helwan University. She started her artistic career as a student, collaborating with her older brother, Abdel Ghany Kenawy. Their collaboration resulted in a large number of artworks ranging from sculptures, compositions and videos. Their work gained several awards and international recognition, including UNESCO's Grand Prize at the International Cairo Biennale. Amal married Shady Elnoshokaty, a contemporary artist who helped her at the beginning of her career. After they divorced Amal lived with her son, Yassin. Her solo work drew upon a more intimate approach. She used her own body alongside representations of fragile materials, animals and objects, to express mental and physical pain and address themes such as birth, marriage, death, dreams and memory. Amal Kenawy died on August 19, 2012, at the age of 38 after a long battle with leukemia. Her work is still exhibited in many museums and institutions around the world. She is remembered as one of the most inspirational feminist artists in the Middle East. She was an iconic female artist, respected for her creativity and deep devotion to her work, though tragically short-lived. Her work is collected by major public collection, such as Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar and the Sharjah Art Foundation in the UAE, and exhibited in major biennials such as Dakar Biennale and Sharjah Biennial.

• 2002 Frozen Memory, video, photograph and sculpture composition • 2004 The Room, performance • 2004 The Journey, video performance and wax sculpture featuring Amal wearing a white dress and floating above the floor of the room in which she is confined, only to later drop heavily on her feet to resume twirling and floating again • 2006 You Will Be Killed, video animation and paintings • 2006 Booby-Trapped Heaven, video and photography • 2007 Non Stop Conversation, video and performance • 2009 The Silence of Lambs AKA The Silence of Sheep, public performance

The Room (2004) is a single-channel video and simultaneous live-action performance that was exhibited at Darat al Funun: The Khalid Shoman Exhibition in Amman, Jordan. The video, lasting approximately ten minutes in duration, entails several scenes with bridal-themed imagery. These include a scene with a woman hanging from a tree wearing the structure of an old-fashioned gown, a bride laying amongst wool and candles in a bed, and the lace-gloved hands of a woman whose face is concealed shown slowly sewing ornaments to a beating anatomical heart. On a small platform stage alongside the video, Kenawy embarks on the process of stitching a white dress on a mannequin that she eventually lights on fire and lets burn to nothing. This creates a glowing spectacle at the end of the performance in the dark room where it takes place. Kenawy intended for these digital and physical wedding motifs to serve as metaphors that symbolize the role of gender and marriage in the Islamic society, as well as the impact that these socio-cultural structures have on the individual. In conceptualizing this artwork, Kenawy drew from her dreams, memories, and lived realities to construct an idea of what defines an individual's truest self. In doing this, she contrasts the goals of her various other artworks that aim to reflect universal human experiences rather than exemplifying her own personal traumas and feelings. The imagery of the beating heart being stitched with ornaments is one of the longest shown during the performance. By contrasting the stagnant accessories being stitched with the moving anatomical heart, the imagery is specifically meant to reflect the rigidity of marriage compared to the mobility of the human being. The title of this performance was intended to further emphasize this concept of interconnectivity as it ties to Kenawy's belief that there is an internal, metaphorical "room" bounding the physical human body that is separate from our surroundings: the external "room". The visuals in this performance were also meant to draw from the ways the human body influences its surroundings as well as how external context shapes the individual; a theme central to several of Kenawy's works including You Will Be Killed (2006) and Booby-Trapped Heaven (2006). This theme is often extrapolated upon by critics and educational professionals who claim that her works reflect the larger patriarchal context that Kenawy operated within in Cairo: implying many of her performances have feminist goals. In her online interview with Gerald Matt, a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Kenawy clarifies that this piece, along with many of her other works, is not intended to be feminist propaganda. She does however acknowledge the crucial role that gender plays in the majority of her performances and displays and denotes that her work is meant to explore humanity and emotion in all realms, including that of gender inequality.