i never revealed myself to them - Catalogue essay by Nadine Nour el Din

Ibrahim Ahmed’s first solo exhibition at Tintera, I never revealed myself to them, presents a carefully curated series of works that deal with an overarching theme of masculinity, tracing what anthropologist Farha Ghannam calls ‘masculine trajectories’. Deeply personal and introspective, at once intersecting with notions of identity, masculinity, nation-building and colonial history, the personal here is deeply intertwined with the political. The exhibition includes works from four iterations of Ahmed’s wider body of work; burn what needs to be burned, you can’t recognise what you don’t know, some parts seem forgotten and quickly but carefully cross to the other side.The first work we encounter is a haunting image of what appears to be a young man with a thick head of hair and prominent moustache against the fading composite background of a cityscape, with a waving flag in the distance. The forms of his face are made up of several photographs, layered to show his features from different angles; at once, he looks softly, directly at the camera, he looks away, his profile is visible, his gaze obscured, and he squints directly towards the lens. In an intimate portrait, Ahmed depicts an underlying softness in a masculine subject, as opposed to the stoic, and oftentimes vitriolic aspects of masculinity that dominate much photography of male subjects. Ahmed adopts a subversive manner that one can imagine in dialogue with a number of other photographers that depicted their subjects similarly, including Malick Sidibé, Rineke Dijkstra, David Wojnarowicz, Masahisa Fukase and Samuel Fosso, to name a few. In learning the identity of this subject, Ahmed’s work can also be seen as an exploration of his identity, which coupled with the use of photomontage as a technique echoes comparable explorations of identity politics in the work of Martha Rosler and Barbara Kruger among others. quickly but carefully cross to the other side #12 (2020) features the artist’s father, fitting as the exhibition takes its name from a remark by him. ‘I never revealed myself to them’ was a response to questions about intimate family archival photographs that form the basis of Ahmed’s collage practice. To Ahmed, this response signifies his father’s relationship to the body, intimacy, and vulnerability, offering insight into a scarcity of affection that he witnessed growing up. In examining both the images and his father’s remarks, Ahmed observes that ‘the essence of masculinity is to divert one’s vulnerabilities and to harden oneself to be an enforcer of social constructs’. A selection of large-scale collage works, intimate, smaller scale works, and installations invite the viewer to closely inspect the intricacy and materiality of his practice. Ibrahim Ahmed draws from his family archives as reference material, in a research process that entails investigating his lineage and upbringing. He examines an extensive archive that spans approximately 60 years, comprised of photographs primarily taken by his father, that the artist describes as an archive of his life and his mother’s life as well. Through his collage works, Ahmed reconstructs and reimagines these narratives in a visual language that employs his personal history, in a manner that draws out and brings to the fore the implications of wider national and colonial histories, that are often embedded within the original photographic archive, present only in clues. Ahmed cites Timothy Mitchell’s seminal text Colonising Egypt (1988), Farha Ghannam’s Live and Die Like a Man (2013), and Wilson Chacko Jacob’s Working Out Egypt (2010) as references for his research. Reading these books and being in the informal neighbourhood of Ardellewa, where he lives and works, he explains beginning to understand his father, remembering anecdotes from his upbringing, tying references to Egypt’s colonial project to memories of his father’s schooling in Monofeya, in northern Egypt. This resonance continues as he revisits his family archives, with a renewed focus on masculinity, manliness, and muscles, his father’s emphasis on discipline, and the prevalence of markers of American popular culture. Each iteration of his wider body of work builds on the previous one, accumulating a mechanism of learning and unlearning. This begins with burn what needs to be burned, in which Ahmed is seen in a mask, in his most overt performance of masculinity, along with compositions of collaged elements of structures and systems. you can’t recognise what you don’t know pictures the artist in a performance that took place in his studio. He can be seen posturing with a rope atop a cement slab, appearing muscular and visibly flexing in a performance of masculinity. These images are spliced and reconfigured through collages, in which the artist markedly constructs his monochromatic compositions placing emphasis on certain actions, postures, and forms. The slab on which his performance takes place is also presented within this exhibition, elevated on a plinth. It provides an opportunity for the viewer to engage with a physical element of this performance, whilst the mass of the cement places emphasis on the empty space directly above it, where the weight of a sculpture or structure would typically be. In you can’t recognise what you don’t know, some parts seem forgotten and quickly but carefully cross to the other side, Ibrahim Ahmed strictly examines his own relationship to history, his own personal history, as well as connecting it to a larger discourse. His source material takes his compositions outside of a controlled studio environment, where he is looking at a history that he did not necessarily create, piecing together what was being captured in those images, and weaving his own narrative. These composite photographs are reminiscent of early experiments in photomontage resulting from ‘the association of photographic elements, which have diverse origins, natures and proportions, combined in such a way as to express with force a particular idea’,* a technique employed by members of Egypt’s Art and Liberty Group (1938-1945) who used double exposure, distortion, assemblage as well as photomontage as a tool to explore and express the subconscious mind. Ahmed picks up on cars, monuments, institutions and physicality, recurring elements that connect to his personal trajectories and inspects how they have been passed down through lineage. He creates composite images in what he describes as an intimate conversation, where he addresses internal concerns, then turns outwards to look within specific sites, that are each loaded with their own narratives. Narratives that are projected through his father’s posture, in the way that his father chooses to photograph himself in front of a certain building or structure, and in what his children would do in his presence as opposed to in the presence of their mother. An examination of public versus private space informs his understanding of masculinity. Presenting elements of building construction and architecture, he inspects the architecture of the body, using sharp lines and measuring the tension within the structures and characters that populate each of his compositions. By cutting up and reconstructing the body he seeks to turn it into an object, highlighting an internalised standard of masculinity, projected in an industrialised perception of what it’s supposed to be.

Learning to be a good boy

Ibrahim Ahmed’s body of work comes as a result of living sensitively and his continued attempts to unlearn what he has identified as toxic behaviours of men that he views are becoming more warped and more toxic. By physically placing himself in the work, he finds the ability to dissect himself and examine his own behaviour through a reconstructive lens. In The Will to Change (2004), Bell Hooks writes that ‘the patriarchal assault on the emotional life of boys begins at the moment of their birth’, signalling the deeply embedded frameworks of our patriarchal societies that are at the root of toxic masculinity. This is a notion that Farha Ghannam echoes in Live and Die Like a Man (2013), as she describes the way children are taught to look in both directions and wait for a break in the line of vehicles, when they learn through relatives how to cross the road. Through a set of standardised processes, one learns how to negotiate spaces and social contexts, bodily posture, internalised classed and gendered habits, assimilating what society ascribes to being a good boy. Ahmed traces this journey, especially apparent in his series quickly but carefully cross to the other side. In A Limited Construction of Masculinity (1996), Robert Fernea writes, ‘we learn about men only outside the company of their immediate families, outside the circle of paternal love, outside the intimacy which would lead to self-reflection’. Ibrahim Ahmed’s work posits that we can learn about men through this very intimacy that leads to self-reflection. For it is precisely through this self-reflective lens that the artist asserts his experience of the performance of masculinity; examining what it means to be a man, what it means to perform masculinity.

*José Pierre, “Hannah Höch et le photomontage des Dadaists berhnois,” Techniques Graphiques, no. 66 (November–December 1966), p.352.

Nadine Nour el Din is a researcher and cultural practitioner. She holds a BA in Visual Arts from the American University in Cairo, an MA in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently pursuing an MA in Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Her academic, curatorial, and research work focuses on the arts and cultural production of the Arab world and wider region.