Moataz Nasr

Khaled Hafez, Wooden Skies. Moataz Nasr embodies the human dilemma with a chess game of mud and water in “Egypt Today”, December 2000, p. 36. (www.egypttoday.com)

Painter and installation artist Moataz Nasr's exhibit was an act of divine inspiration. His work is based on the description in the Quran of the total dominance of almighty creator over everything between earth and sky. The stupendous impact of the project's title in Arabic, Al Samaa Wal Ard Wa ma Baynahuma (Skies, Earth and What's in-between), shoots straight through the heart.

Two floors of the gallery house the various elements of Nasr's conceptual installation. The audience too is part of the whole project, losing their status as viewers to play the role of simple earthlings. The ceiling of the gallery is decked with raw, unfinished wooden logs, creating a combined sensation of awe, semiclaustrophobia and romanticism. On a certain level, being inside this room of wooden skies feels like walking through the slopping tunnels of the Valley of the Kings to pay homage to the excavated tombs. The decaying walls of the gallery which envelop the work enhance its visual effect and create an atmosphere of New Age mystery. For Nasr, the meaning of the sky is spiritual. “The sky is spiritual and emotional in all religions and beliefs. It carries values of virtue and higher spirituality levels,” he explains. The transformation of the sky into wood symbolises the barrier between the creator and his creations.

The Earth is symbolic of everything material. Nasr translated this into a gigantic game of chess to signify conflicts between earthlings, whose lives are fraught with victories and defeats, gains and losses, domination and subjugation. The artist expresses this concept brilliantly, using 64 square containers, 32 of which hold water, while the other 32 contain mud. The former denote man's eternal quest for water, while the mud signifies the struggle for territory, for which nations commit the most shocking atrocities.

Between the wooden skies and the floor, tens of long sticks stand crooked. The curvature is achieved by using sticks which are slightly longer than the distance between the cailing and the floor. According to Nasr, the bent sticks epitomise the human condition vis-a-vis spirituality and concrete reality. “Some people find salvation in faith, others keep their feet on the ground and find salvation in more tangible things. In our culture, I believe we are bent sticks being neither spiritual nor materialistic. We lost the first and we are simply unable to be the second,” Nasr elaborates.

Richard Woffenden, Heavens Above. Enlightening encounters inside Moataz Nasr's latest installation in “Cairo Times”, 14-20/12/2000. (www.cairotimes.com)

Both gallerist and artist are aware that this is no money-spinner, and Nasr faces a wide variety of hurdles before arriving at this new creation. The Sky and the Earth and What's in Between is a wonderful installation that succeeds precisely because Nasr went head on towards the challenges instead of trying to dodge them.

In a normal house, the rooms on the second floor of the Townhouse would be crying out for a coat of paint, but for an installation artist, the cracks and murkier shade of white can add atmosphere. While it has detracted from some exhibitions of late, here the installation embraces these rooms that have seen the passage of long periods of time. The result is that the concepts of creation are set against a feel of the decay of the material world.

Entering the first room, the visitor is faced with an artificially low ceiling that appeals to be squeezing down upon staves that are holding up the sky. The effect is unnerving at first. But as you walk around a varying curvatures of the staves, they play further illusions upon your eyes. Here the visitor is faced with white material blocking off the door on the far side of the room. Although a vaguely distracting, the viewer should be guided by the form of the exhibit and the lighting to concentrate on the center of the room.

The lighting is also the key to the second room, which is dominated by a chessboard of large squares of baked earth and glass squares holding water. The earth is reminiscent of chocolate brownies, which in itself will please many. Though Nasr created all the squares in his studio in Old Cairo, the varying shades and texture of the glass squares containing the water broke by accident, they moistened the earth thereby adding a new dimension to the exhibit.

The overall effect of this room is calming: the overhead light focuses your attention on the chessboard, only a form of earth and water. Initially I found it strange – when Nasr and I had talked about the project several weeks before, this room was to have been about conflict. As a representation of war, however, the chessboard does speak about conflicts and even what will be the left when all the fighting stops.

The final room is the most touching. Developed from the installation that was shown at the Nitaq festival, there is a false ceiling of small, old pieces of wood behind which a light shines down and penetrates through the gaps. It is a gentle, soft experience, and the spiritual suggestion of enlightenment lying in sight but still out of reach is powerful. The original idea for this vision came from Nasr's experience at the burial of his mother. He entered the old crypt and he stood there while everyone else left. Even when they started placing the old planks of wood over the top of the stairs where the entrance was, he saw the wood as a sort of ceiling for his mother between her world and our world. This room was an attempt to recreate these feelings, and through this, the links between the three rooms becomes clearer.

Lisa Harun, Installations, Expressionism, Functionality and Theatre. The Sky and the Earth and What's in Between. Installation by Moataz Nasr in “Enigma”, December 2000, pp.68-69. (www.enigma-mag.com)

Have you ever met someone who instead of talking with their mouth and mind, communicates to you through their soul, whereby when he speaks, eyes well up? Moataz is such a man.

Moataz has been an artist now for more than 15 years. In the last year or so, his work has paid off, seeing him able to reap the benefits of many gruelling hours of mind-bending work. His latest installation, “The Sky and the Earth and What's in Between”, is in part both a reflection of his life experiences and life's reality. The installation consists of three rooms. The first room is entitled The Sky, the inspiration of which came from a recent tragic incident in his life, the death of his mother. When the last bits of earth dropped, he asked for a moment alone, solidifying the fact that she would always be with him. When leaving the tomb, the curators had partially closed the entrance with old pieces of wood, whereby when one looked up what was seen was a darkened sky with bits of light seeping in. And there he had his sky, rather the sky that his mother's body would have for the eternity. The room is a whitewashed room with a wooden ceiling. The installation is such that Moataz had created a pseudo sun, and the planks have been strategically placed recreating his mother's skylight seeping through the dark cracked ceiling. The next room is The Earth. The inspiration for this came from a space he came upon coincidentally. During his travels one afternoon he came upon a construction site that had once been playground for small school children. The ground had been cleared and all that remained were the drying clay memories of playground past. Fascinated by the transformation, everyday for three weeks he came to photograph this area up until construction workers closed the site. This was the beginning of The Earth in his installation. What transpired from there was the incorporation of water in this stage of the installation. It is set up in the form of a chessboard. Sixty-four perfectly cut squares, 32 of clay and 32 of glass and water. The chessboard represents the game that we play, the game that is life... and What's in Between? Us... in the form of wooden beams bent this way and that. Some straight, some bent, some as pillars. This, too, stemmed from life whereby when helping out a friend in need, he had fixed some spoiled wood by placing them floor to ceiling in the opposite way they had coiled. From this came the end of his vision. I simply do not do justice to the luminance of this installation, only when heard from the lips of the artist is this piece ever really, apart from pure observation, heard. Now showing at Townhouse Gallery for a limited time. Keep your eyes peeled for Moataz's work at the International Biennale and the Al Nitaq in March.

Moataz Nasr in “Egypt Insight Magazine”, December 2000. (www.egyptinsight.com)

A very different installation will be taking up the second floor of the Townhouse Gallery this month. Moataz Nasr, who is one of the artists chosen to take part in the Cairo Biennale next March, produces his art from a point of solitary introspection. Here id has manifest as “The Sky, The Earth, and What Lies In-between” – a phrase from the Koran. “My idea is a very general one. It's about life – my life in particular. What an I doing and where have the last 39 years been hanging? The result is not religious, but it contains an element of spirituality.”

The installation is spread through three rooms, the first representing the sky. Look up and you'll find a false ceiling, carefully constructed from pieces of wood with light beamed through it to form rays. “Remember as a child when you'd put your hand through a sunbeam and catch the particles of dust dancing in it? That's the effect I wanted to produce,” says Moataz. “The mood is cool, soft, transcendental. It should feel so quiet that if people speak, you want to tell them to hush.”

The second room, representing the earth, contains 64 boxes, each one fifty centimetres square. Half are made from clay, symbolising the thirsty land we're living in, and half are made from glass and filled with water. They are placed in the chequered form of a chessboard to give the impression of a game. “The game is life itself. Someone has to win, someone has to lose, people fight, people leave... The whole square is placed in the corner because I didn't want people to walk around it. The concept of the earth for me is both materialistic and mysterious.”

And what's in between? “Us. Some of us lean more to the earth and some of us to the sky. We have to live in a materialistic world but that doesn't mean we can't aspirate to a more spiritual life.” The third room – the “us” room – is filled with sticks of wood. Some lie on the ground, but most stand upright at various heights, some reaching the ceiling and some taller than the ceiling, so that they've had to be bent forcibly into place. The buckling that results is a painful and effective representation.

Teresa Macrì, Arte e Magia di una Metropoli. Il Cairo. la Nouvelle Vague Egiziana in “Alias” (supplemento de “Il Manifesto”), 20/10/2001, n. 40, pp.6-7.

L'alessandrino Moataz Nasr (1961) allude a uno spazio simbolico come momento di trasformazione e cambiamento. Installazioni minimali realizzate in legno, terra, acqua, erba indirizzano verso nuove territorializzazioni.