DUBAI: “I feel like I never tire of drawing scenes of Cairo,” says Nora Zeid, an illustrator, designer and visual artist embarking on her first solo exhibition. “It’s visually rich, it’s loud, it overwhelms your senses in so many different ways. It’s such an amazing city for an artist to explore.”
The young Egyptian is joyfully discussing her home town, with all its madness and foibles, despite having lived as an expat in Dubai for the majority of her life.
“You know what one of my favorite things is? It’s the façades of residential buildings,” she says. “The architects who designed these buildings probably intended them to be consistent, with all the balconies designed to look the same. But when you look at the façade of a residential building in Cairo every apartment is doing its own thing. Someone has a bunch of plants, someone has painted their balcony blue, someone else has decided to close off their balcony to create an extra room. There’s this strange rhythm of every person doing their own thing; of everyone unapologetically being themselves.”
Nora Zeid is an illustrator, designer and visual artist. (Supplied)
For an artist, this is incredibly exciting, says Zeid, who depicts the city of her birth and its often-overlooked intricacies in a new exhibition at Tashkeel in Dubai using digital and hand-drawn illustrations. “There are layers and layers of detail and texture, and translating that into black-and-white illustrations is extremely enjoyable. Because I take all of this complexity and reduce it to something that’s somewhat visually digestible.”
In “Cairo Illustrated: Stories from Heliopolis,” which runs at Tashkeel until October 23, that has meant freezing moments in space and time, often with the help of photographs taken either by herself or by family and friends. These images enable Zeid to notice small details she would otherwise have missed, such as a cat sleeping in the corner of a room or a pile of chairs gathering dust.
Cairo Illustrated Stories from Heliopolis, printed digital llustration, Spread 10. (Supplied)
“The illustrations are really spatial,” she explains. “Anything in the foreground is usually very detailed, but as I move further into the background I abstract my lines. I’m maintaining some kind of structural complexity, but as buildings, objects and people fade into the distance they become more abstract. I’m trying to replicate the feeling I get when I’m standing in a busy street; maintaining all the details without necessarily giving away what every single thing is.”
The exhibition, which marks the conclusion of the 2020 edition of Tashkeel’s Critical Practice Program, has been driven by Zeid’s desire to understand her home city. As an expat, she felt alienated from Cairo and often passed judgement on it — on the traffic, on the pollution, on the numerous daily challenges faced by its inhabitants. “It’s a kinder approach to yourself and to the city to try and understand what it’s like, rather than to cast judgement,” she says. So she set about researching the city, its neighborhoods, and its people, before narrowing her research down to Heliopolis. There, she gathered stories and recorded memories, took photographs as visual cues, and immersed herself in the sensory overload that is Cairo.
Cairo Illustrated Stories from Heliopolis, printed digital llustration, Spread 9. (Supplied)
One of the stories is that of her grandmother, who has been frequenting a restaurant called Chantilly for the past 40 years. Another is of the architect Omniya Abdel Barr. Zeid remembers being perplexed by the empty ornamental circles she saw on the façades of buildings in Korba as a child. Years later, she discovered they were blazons mimicking Mamluk architecture — only they were missing the Arabic script that would identify the building’s patron because they were built by Europeans who couldn’t understand Arabic.
Together, the collected stories form a deconstructed graphic novel that is 32 pages long, says Zeid, although she hopes to add “more memories, more details and more stories. Because I think these stories make up the fabric of our heritage”. It is the concept of heritage — or what constitutes heritage — that informs much of the exhibition.
“When it comes to how we value our heritage in Egypt it’s often tied to tourism, rather than our identity or trying to understand our history better,” says Zeid, who likes her work to be accessible and is a graduate of the American University of Sharjah. “Our heritage is protected and safeguarded for tourists and it’s only our ancient heritage – the Pharaonic, Islamic and Coptic – that’s taken care of. All of which made me question what we consider to be heritage, how we value it, and how we take care of it. I wanted to explore how we value anything that’s old. What about newer, more modern spaces? What about places such as Chantilly, which is part of our heritage because it’s present in our collective memory?”
Cairo Illustrated Stories from Heliopolis, printed digital llustration, Spread 8. (Supplied)
Such questions have allowed Zeid to explore how tourism, infrastructure and changes to the urban landscape have influenced the way Cairenes define and interact with their heritage. How new infrastructural projects are disturbing urban harmony, and how the value of built heritage is greatly tied to age.
She hasn’t confronted this topic alone. The Egyptologist Monica Hanna is quoted in one of the illustrated spreads, while Mahy Mourad, a Cairo-based architect, independent researcher and multi-disciplinary designer, has contributed a short essay to the exhibition’s printed catalogue. Abdel Barr, too, has written on places and memories. No wonder Lisa Ball-Lechgar, the deputy director of Tashkeel, says the exhibition is a ‘timely commentary on the ongoing debate around urbanization, socio-economics, heritage and belonging’.
“I’m constantly moving between personal experiences and more general reflections on how we take care of our heritage and how we value it,” says Zeid, who was mentored throughout the Critical Practice Program by designer, researcher and educator Ghalia Elsrakbi and Hala Al-Ani, the co-founder of Möbius Design Studio. “The shift between small- and big-picture, personal and general, makes the topic approachable. And I want people visiting the exhibit to reflect on their own experience and how they might be tied to their own heritage.
“I really want people to think beyond what was (taught to) us, in terms of what we define as heritage and what we consider worth preserving. It’s not only how old a building or monument is. It’s not only if it has religious significance. A residential building from the 1950s can be just as important as a monument from the 14th or 15th century, because it’s all part of our history.”