Shirin Neshat, Looking For Oum Kulthum, Musée De l'Elysée, Lausanne, CH

posted on: Jul 19, 2019

SOURCE: FORBES

BY: CLAYTON PRESS

“When you listen to Umm Kulthum, you just can’t stand still. The song gets inside you and makes you move and then you understand the meaning. The song makes you so happy that you feel you’re dancing with it, you’re living with it.” Unidentified interviewee, Umm Kulthum, A Voice Like Egypt, 1996.

“The Fourth Pyramid” is one of several informal sobriquets bestowed on Oum Kulthum, the iconic, mesmerizing Egyptian singer who died in 1975. Kulthum (note: there are numerous spellings of her name) is considered to be the most authentic Egyptian and Arab vocalist of the 20^th century and into the present, recording some 300 songs and creating a style and form that embodied the country’s musical traditions. While her fame rests on her epic stage performances and recordings, Kulthum was an “active citizen” in Egypt and an emissary across the Arab world. She was president of the Egyptian Musician’s Union for seven years, a member of several Egyptian government cultural committees and a cultural ambassadress to other nations.

That Kulthum is not widely known in the West is not surprising. Following the 1952 Egyptian coup d’état when King Farouk was overthrown, Gamal Abdel Nasser became the nation’s president. In response, Kulthum commissioned the poet Ahmad Rami to write an appropriate national song, titled “Egypt, Which Is in My Mind and My Blood.” Nasser soon nationalized the Suez Canal, calling for pan-Arabic unity, and instituted a series of major socialist measures and modernization reforms.

The nationalization of the Suez Canal was particularly problematic. France and the UK, the largest shareholders in the Suez Canal Company, saw nationalization as a hostile measure aimed specifically at their interests. Nasser was aware that the canal’s nationalization would instigate an international crisis and believed that military intervention was very likely. Between 1956 and 1957, France, the UK and Israel seized the canal. But by March 1957, the three countries had bowed to US pressure and withdrew from the territory. Kulthum’s music and stardom helped Nasser to bolster the trust of the Arab world and build a regional identity. Ten years later, following Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War with Israel, Kulthum—the committed nationalist—embarked on an extensive tour across North Africa and the Middle East to reaffirm the country’s image. Her fund raising efforts were so successful that she sent some 2 million Egyptian pounds back to the Egyptian treasury.

Kulthum, also known as Kawkab al-Sharq (“Star of the East”), was a strong supporter of Arab Nationalism and her relationship with Nasser proved to be mutually beneficial. She recorded numerous songs in support of him and the republic, which strengthened her association with the President. She was the epitome of a dedicated activist entertainer and celebrity. Kulthum made monthly radio concerts for nearly 40 years, initially preceding the speeches of Nasser and later other governmental officials as “The voice of Egypt.”

Virginia Danielson’s definitive 1997 biography, The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthūm, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century, was the basis for the documentary Umm Kulthum, A Voice Like Egypt, which was released in 1996. Narrated by Omar Sharif, the film captures how Kulthum had “the musicality [and improvisational gifts] of Ella Fitzgerald, the public presence [and sense of and commitment to justice] of Eleanor Roosevelt and the [adoring and, frequently, near ecstatic] audiences of Elvis Presley.” As Martin Stokes, an ethnomusicologist observed, Danielson “skillfully involves the reader in one of biography’s compelling dilemmas: is the subject [Kulthum] the product or the producer of [her] circumstances?” Clearly, she was “a force.”

Even to knowledgeable aficionados, Kulthum’s biography and celebrity are difficult to capture or portray. Born around 1904, Kulthum was propelled to stardom at an early age. By the early 1920s, she had secured economic independence, exercised enormous artistic expression and explored a romantic modernity in her repertoire. She had great authority over her film and musical careers. Danielson, her biographer, said Kulthum “shifted positions of power in relation to her patrons, whether individual or corporate, and to her competitors, colleagues and clients . . . [and] constructed herself through transactions.” (The Voice of Egypt, 1997, p. 195.)

Kulthum was also exceptionally private. Video recordings of personal interviews with Kulthum always reveal a reluctant, circumspect subject. She did not like tape recorders, which she termed “a piece of iron,” nor pencil and paper interview notes.

Her apparent strong will, sharp tongue, and the absence of any lasting close personal involvements prompted the assessment that ‘she has not heart.’ Another suggestion was that, “like Greta Garbo,” she had been disappointed in love early in life and could not love another. (The Voice of Egypt, 1997, p. 160.)

When Kulthum talked about herself, she emphasized the Egyptian and Arab Muslim aspects of her background, linking herself to peasants and abnaa’ il-riif, “the sons and daughters of the countryside.” When put in historical context, the rise of Kulthum is even more extraordinary, because she escaped moral stigma as a fallen woman. In the late 18^th century, Egyptian female performers were part of a celebrated community. To be part of that community required

a beautiful voice, a good possession of the language, a knowledge of the rules of poetry and an ability to spontaneously compose and sing, couplets adapted to the circumstances (Images of Enchantment, 1998, p. 21.)

In all probability, Kulthum overcame gender prejudice in part because she characterized her origins as a lower-class Egyptian woman, who had more freedom of association and conversation with men. (Ibid.) As a “working woman,” Kulthum displayed a strong, fearless, even tough personality.

Shirin Neshat’s film, Looking for Oum Kulthum, is not a biopic. In the 2017 film, Neshat the lead director (in collaboration with Shoja Azari), made Kulthum one of two central protagonists. The other protagonist was an Iranian woman—Mitra (played by Neda Rahmanian)—who portrayed a filmmaker living in exile, making a film about the life and art of Kulthum. For an Iranian artist, the choice of portraying an Arab character is almost daring. The Middle East is regularly portrayed in the West, or at least misunderstood, as monolithic, with a largely homogeneous population and little demographic or cultural diversity. This is untrue. Iranian and Arabic cultures, religions and languages are often mistaken in the West as similar. And with respect to religion, Iran is predominantly Shia; the rest of the Middle East region is largely Sunni.

For Neshat, an Iranian, to leverage the independence and celebrity of Kulthum, an Arab, is something of a cultural rapprochement. In this film within a film or, to use a French term, mise en abyme, Mitra—Neshat’s central character—faces a host of struggles and sacrifices pervasive in non-secular, conservative, Islamic male-dominated societies. Neshat

approaches [Kulthum] the world-famed star indirectly, by means of a framing narrative, featuring a woman director who is a shooting a biopic about Kulthum. With a fluid structure which intertwines the fictional film, life on the set and the director’s dreams and visions, Looking for Oum Kulthum is a treatise on cinematic historiography and the doubts and fears that haunt a female artist. (See https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/beyond-biopic-an-interview-with-shirin-neshat.)

Neshat explained, I

allowed myself to act like an artist, trying to make a film that I don’t know how to make. And from then on, the absolute honesty of my attempt as a non-Arab and non-Arab-speaking visual artist and filmmaker became my structure. Of course, this film is an imperfect film and really shows the impossibility of making a film about Oum Kulthum. (Ibid.)

In Looking for Oum Kulthum, Mitra, the Iranian expatriate, is very much a 20^th/21^st century woman, combating private and public neuroses and complex European and contemporary cultural values, both of her native Iran and as a director in North Africa. Like Kulthum, Mitra is a complicated character with deep and entangled roots in Iranian, Arabic and contemporary European and North American cultures.

At the Musée de l’Elysée (Lausanne), Looking for Oum Kulthum is being screened through August 25, 2019, along with two shorter videos made from the movie’s footage. Neshat is also exhibiting a group of eight photographs inspired by vintage 1950’s Egyptian movie posters. They “feature the actresses of the film in portraits of Oum Kulthum at different stages of her life and career . . . Frontal and striking images that attempt to capture the mythical nature of the famous Egyptian diva.” Each portrait, all measuring nearly 50 x 65 in., bears the title of one of Oum Kulthum’s songs, written with ink on the print in Farsi and Arabic calligraphy. These specifically trigger memories of Neshat’s earliest works, commissioned photographs inscribed with calligraphy. The colors are deliciously fruity and eye popping. Kulthum’s surrogates have their black tresses piled high or flowing, sculpted in vintage styles. They also wear the impenetrably dark black cat-eye sunglasses that the diva favored.

The two shorter videos offer, in the words of the museum, “emotional and sensitive visions of Oum Kulthum’s intimate character and of her mystical power on people.” As described by Neshat, Remembrance, was

created as in a state of a dream, a young boy traces Oum Kulthum’s aura and voice through a peculiar labyrinth of time and space. From the boy’s point of view, we observe this larger than life female icon, both in the intimacy of her solitude, and face to face with her audience. Through multiple visual and musical juxtapositions, what prevails is the melancholy of an artist as she battles with fame and a desire to be set free.

The boy transitions in and out of an empty hallway into rooms occupied by characterizations of Kulthum at various ages, revisiting depictions of her chronological and emotional life from childhood to adulthood. It is as if he is wandering through his own future memories.

Neshat’s second considerably dreamier and evocative video, In Trance, successfully captures the sense of delirium that can overcome and envelope audiences. “Oum Kulthum’s music,” Neshat said, “was commonly known to elevate her audience into a state of ecstasy (tarab in Arabic) [or rapture], losing all concepts of time and place.” In Trance explores her fans’ emotional and out-of-body experiences, literally hypnotized by Oum’s voice.

After Neshat completed her art education from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, she “felt what I was making was not substantial enough. . . . So it was only in 1993 that I began to seriously make artwork again.” She felt that photography was the most appropriate medium for her, yet she was not a photographer. Like Christopher Williams, the American conceptual artist, Neshat hired professional photographers to take and make images, which she inscribed with Farsi (Iranian) script.

From the beginning, Neshat’s focus has been on women, first in relation to the Iranian culture and society and the Islamic revolution of 1978-1979, which she explored in photographic series. Next, Neshat made a series of video installations, which she characterized as “very sculptural, with no specific narrative, beginning or end.” (https://bombmagazine.org/articles/shirin-neshat/.) By 1998, Neshat made Turbulent, a two-screen video installation in which two singers created a musical metaphor for gender roles and cultural power within the framework of ancient Persian music and poetry. Rapture (1999), also a two-screen installation of synchronized video, “self-consciously exploits entrenched clichés about gender and space: namely, the equation of woman with irrational, wild nature and man with rational, ordered culture.” (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/184206/rapture.)

As she recalled in a 2000 interview with the late Arthur Danto, the American art critic and philosopher, despite the success of her photographs and installations, “I no longer wanted to make work that dealt so directly with issues of politics. I wanted to make work that was more lyrical, philosophical and poetic.” (Ibid.) Neshat then undertook more cinematic projects: first, Women without Men (2009) and, more recently, Looking for Oum Kulthum. With the latter film and its companion videos and staged photography, Neshat is clearly within the territory of the poetic. In her conversation with Danto, Neshat recalled, “Many people, including critics and curators, have been comparing the last few works I have made, telling me which one they think succeeds or does not work as well. I think what is more important is the developmental process, and looking at how each work visually and conceptually takes the ideas forward.” With Looking for Oum Kulthum, Neshat gracefully continues this evolution.

Shirin Neshat, Looking for Oum Kulthum, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, CH through August 25, 2019