Even experimenters need time to experiment. For the past several years, the cohort of creative cartoonists in Cairo have participated in Inktober. Each day of October, they pull out their pens and draw fun stuff, which they then eagerly share on Facebook. Gone are the tricks afforded by tablets and styluses; gone are the constraints of editorial cartooning or graphic novels.
A recent show at Medrar showed off these unruly works. The result: Expired Ink, a tightly curated introduction to Egypt’s established illustrators and emerging comic artists.
With ten inkers letting loose, I noticed two trends: nostalgic pastiche and supernatural fantasy.
What is it about Inktober—and the return to basics—that draws out melancholia? Take note of Mai Koraiem, an Alexandrian artist and author of the 2015 graphic novel Cavafis, a bio-comic of the poet Constantine P. Cavafy. For Expired Ink, Koraiem presented five detailed compositions of Egyptian nostalgia, including stamps, receipts, postcards, and other ephemera that together tells a story of Egypt’s modern archaeological record.
Similarly, Ahmed Hefnawy rendered ghosts of the past. His realistic characters might have written the correspondences or signed the receipts in Koraiem’s collages. Hefnawy’s solemn characters stand beside iconic objects. Are they an homage to the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema or to the Golden Age of advertising? Are these images earnest or ironic? Elegantly framed and beautifully finished, Hefnawy’s Inktober drawings ask us whether the class structures of the past—the bashas and effendis—are still with us. They are also reminiscent of his “Made in Egypt” series for the alt-comix zine Tok Tok, which features portraits of downtown Cairo mainstays. Recent shows in Cairo have focused on the objects of modernity. Hefnawy asks us: Who used these objects? Why are they important?
The rest of the artists entered worlds strange and whimsical. Makhlouf offered up roosters five ways (Would you care for it intricately crosshatched or as a simple line drawing?). Mohamed Tawfik let his quirky characters—bounty hunters, bar hounds and cowboys—go wild. Hicham Rahma’s works were a stream of consciousness of bizarre love triangles, fallen angels, and unreal animals. Rahma’s sketchbook, sitting open in the gallery’s corner for viewers to peruse, was a highlight—an opportunity to gaze further into his twisted mind. Likewise, Ahmed Tawfig’s creatures were otherworldly.
If the thirty-one days of Inktober are a provocation for digitally-inclined artists to return to the drawing board, then Expired Ink ought to serve as an inspiration to curators. Framed black-and-white drawings are always a pleasure to savor, and Egypt has no shortage of talented illustrators mining their memories or their imaginations.
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