Huda Lutfi’s recent exhibition Unraveling showcased work from her latest projects at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai: When Dreams Call for Silence (2019), Healing Devices (2020), and Our Black Thread (2021). Though varying in medium and source material, the projects are linked by her earnest meditations on mortality, healing, and seeking solid ground within oneself. The first project is a whimsical collection of installations, paintings, and videos; the second features a series of abstract paper collages; while the third presents minimalist and delicate works in thread and fabric. Some of the work is displayed for the first time, while other pieces represent new phases of ongoing projects. A partial retrospective, the exhibition offers an opportunity to step back and consider how these works enrich the oeuvre of an Egyptian artist whose heart always runs close to the pulse of the world around her.
Between the Lines
When I ask the artist why she chose to display previous projects rather than her newest, she tells me, “Sometimes you miss out on certain readings; when you revisit, you can see new connections.” Some display choices at The Third Line help make these connections tangible. Works from all three projects are shown interspersed throughout the gallery, occasionally creating striking juxtapositions. When the worn-out leather suitcase full of old dolls from When Dreams Call for Silence is displayed on the floor between two works from Our Black Thread, it highlights the tactile materiality in Lutfi’s work, as well as the body’s connection to fabric – wearing it or weaving it.
Two recurring elements in the display are the use of wooden structures and the arrangement of collections into grids. A large wooden structure serves as an exaggerated frame for a delicate fabric suspended in a glass panel titled Lines and Knots. You can look through the bars to see the installation Floating, paper figurines sheathed in fabric, hanging by threads like marionettes, and enjoy a playful moment where the projects overlap both spatially and thematically. On a nearby wall, a collection of small bricolage works, precursors to the Healing Devices collection, is arranged in a grid, while elsewhere in the gallery, miniature thread works made on organza tea bags are collected in a single frame, also arranged neatly in a grid.
“The precursors to the Healing Devices are a bit closer to the Thread pieces in being more intuitive, and having that freedom to play with form and experiment more easily,” Lutfi shares. While the recurrence of these orderly grids, squares, and lines visually ties the works together, it comes at the expense of diminishing the dreamy, playful feeling that Lutfi’s work is so capable of exuding. This echoes the original display at the project’s debut in Cairo in 2019, where the artist included a chair from her own home to evoke that sense of personal connection.
With such strong ties to her surroundings, it’s difficult to regard Lutfi’s work since 2019 without considering her earlier socio-politically charged projects. Perhaps it’s the contrast between the outer and inner worlds – her confident political satire and elusive self-reflection - that makes her oeuvre so intriguing. She is one of those artists who holds up a mirror to her context. For some years now, she has tilted it at a different angle to look within. I first encountered that mirror at the Cairo opening of When Dreams Call for Silence:
To get to Tahrir Cultural Center, I was rushing past the overwhelming street traffic and noise that characterizes Downtown Cairo, the backdrop that informs much of Huda’s work. I rushed past the police officers from her 2010 collages, past vitrines and store fronts with the mannequins she very often uses, some dolled up and overdressed, others with broken limbs balanced awkwardly against each other. But more significantly, I rushed past bodies and bodies and bodies of people- past the eyes, and lips and ears of the city. I rushed past stories and dreams I know nothing about. I reach the gallery and find most of these elements in her collages and installations. The police officers, though, have disappeared.
Cycles of Healing
As tempting as it is to compare Lutfi’s current era to earlier ones, there may be another way to reconcile her divergent directions. Is it possible that all her work – political or not - is touched by a form of grieving? Perhaps subtle types of grief that she renders tactile through her choice of materials, and ritualistic through her working process.
When Dreams Call for Silence contained a veiled nod to Egypt’s increasingly restrictive political atmosphere, which some interpreted from the title. But Lutfi herself, in interviews, reflected on the difference between “silence imposed” and “silence you find within”. A grief for certain freedoms, or hopes for a different future, was certainly in the minds of her contemporaries, if not overtly visible in the work. That project also holds a grief for her future self, most poignantly in a painting like The Last Gaze, where she wonders, with quiet vulnerability, about her own death.
While making Our Black Thread, she sat in her home, sewing meditatively on tiny teabag fabrics against the backdrop of a pandemic and collective grief over all that was lost at the time: health, community, connection, clarity, and momentum. Healing Devices was a project she began after her mother had a stroke, also during the pandemic, with death circling in her mind.
“My mother, a seamstress, used to make my clothes, and we worked together on the patterns. So I always saw her being very active,” Lutfi says, shedding light on her domestic context. She is tapping into a type of grief familiar to those of us who watched our parents’ health decline, long before they depart. Losing the image we had of them is a slower kind of loss, but no less painful. Her process of bricolage holds an innate connection to grief, mimicking the cycle of life and death by cutting up her old paintings and giving them new life on handmade gold or silver leaf paper used in rituals. “I began thinking that ‘Healing Devices’ is something I could go back to when I need healing. The process itself is healing.”
In fact, Lutfi’s entire art practice began in relation to her own physical pain after an operation, seen in her first and now well-known artwork Woman Cut in Half (1991). In The Seven Legged Demon on the Night, the newest video work in the exhibition, Lutfi once again accesses grief as she memorialises her now-deceased mother. Her mother’s working hands, fragile and wrinkled, are shown mimicking sewing motions repeatedly as she sits in bed, with nothing between her fingers. Repetition, self-soothing, memory, familiarity, and rituals are all recurring themes in Lutfi’s work, overlapping in this simple, yet emotionally loaded video. It serves as a teaser for her upcoming project in the same vein, which will include objects from her family archive and fabric-based artwork.
“It’s difficult to work on the family, not just because of contradictory emotions like guilt, anger, love, and care, but also because it’s difficult to destroy or reuse pieces from the family collection. It’s a process of letting go of attachments,” the artist says.
Resistance to Resilience
Lutfi’s quiet introspection offers a still moment of resilience against an increasingly fast, loud, and distracting world. Her work in ‘Unraveling’ eludes making loud statements, but it gets under your skin, maybe to haunt, or maybe to soothe.
“I love how calming this is,” I overheard a young woman tell her partner at the gallery. They’re standing before the installation ‘Floating’.
“…a bit disturbing, don’t you think…hanging in a room like that….prefer this one maybe…” a young man shares with a couple of brightly dressed companions.
