your love is like an egg,
that you threw at me.

"I don’t want to."

"It was the inconsequence of the act that shocked … Love, devotion, effort, could only pour into her, a jug without a bottom, and then pour out, leaving no trace. She deserved nothing, was owed nothing, could not really be loved and therefore could not be missed. So she had gone."— Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”

— “Käthe Kollwitz” by Muriel Rukeyser

"To me, the camera is like a gun"

"Because you say "I" for me."

"When are you going to get over him?"

“She has kept her head lowered…to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns, and walks away.”

“I’d rather go blind, than to see you walk away from me.”
 

"I’m not like you. I don’t feel like you."

"I didn’t want any flowers"

"Make me change my life"

"He gave me a present. He wants to kill me."

"I Love You"

"I’m always bumping into other people’s unconscious"

We met. For Breakfast. At 5am. O my...

misplaced affection

i've eaten far too much of the wrong things.

is it possible for two to exist without overthrowing eachother  ?

Was our love the total eclipse?

I must begin by accepting myself and not feeling the punitive horror of every time I fall, for when I fall the human race inside me falls too.

lament

ləˈmɛnt/

Theres you and theres me, and theres everything in between
I told you I was an atheist, you said, I've never met a woman closer to God than you.

“I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me. ”
― Anaïs Nin

field notes 3

Words have ability to create or demolish her sense of self.

how to deal with betrayal and failed communication. and the despair that results.

To Cairo/
In my village, each house would be empty and silent but the barn would be full. Full of honest people who had no church making a church out of themselves. Their flesh and blood. The patient cattle sheep.

she alluded me the way the tarts alluded me

What does a faithful life look like, a life informed by stories of faith such as those told about Abraham? Rose describes the life of faith as one in which an individual is continually “willing to stake oneself again” (1992, 148). By this she means that a person with faith will whole-heartedly participate in the practice of positing concepts (norms) and testing them against reality (practice), always willing to revise the concepts they posit. A faithful person will not exempt themselves from this process; he will remain sensitive to the evidence of experience, never dogmatically holding to concepts that are not supported by evidence, to norms not supported by practice. It is thus only faith “that prevents one from becoming an arbitrary perpetrator or an arbitrary victim; that prevents one, actively or passively, from acting with arbitrary violence” (1992, 148).
694 Journal of Religious Ethics
To hold dogmatically to a view of the world, as discussed above, is to act with arbitrary violence because it is to offer reprimands that are not supported by the evidence of experience and are only based on personal whims held as dogmatic truths. A faithful person does not imagine that she can act without violence; rather, she realizes that all actions are continually implicated in violence and yet she perseveres in acting, in positing concepts and testing them against realities. In this struggle, “‘violence’ is inseparable from staking oneself, from experi- ence as such—the initial yet yielding recalcitrance of action and passion” (1992, 151).
This is why Rose opposes much contemporary religious thought, both Jewish and Christian. She takes the project of religious thinkers, from Buber to Fackenheim to Metz to Milbank, to be one of “mending the world,” which has the effect of “betraying” the hard work of living (1992, 293). In short, they lack faith. They lack the commitment to persist in the “revel of ideas and risk” that is living and instead opt for an easy out, for the fantasy of an ethics purified of law (1995, 135). The “New Jerusalems” that they posit foreclose the possibility of critical analysis of social norms, of the worldly power and worldly institutions from which they recoil. “Against the tradition from St. Paul to Kant which opposes law to grace and knowledge to faith . . . the modern congrega- tion of the disciplines—from philosophy to architecture—loses faith when it renounces concept, learning, and law” (1992, 307).
If Kierkegaard identifies and describes the problem of anxiety, the solution he offers is a lifestyle of faith, on Rose’s reading. Anxiety is experienced any time one truly grapples with the law. To live life without anxiety would be to shut oneself off from a central feature of the world; it would be to live in delusion. Living life without anxiety is like living life without freedom—possible, perhaps, but only when one understands social norms to be absolutely rigid and static.
Rose notes Kierkegaard’s two-stage move, which demonstrates the relationship between law, anxiety, and faith (1992, 89–90). First, there is a movement “from law to anxiety.” A person who is living an ordinary life in the world experiences anxiety for some reason—perhaps because of a moment of crisis when social norms are suspended. Faith allows the individual to return back from the moment of anxiety to the law. Instead of despairing indefinitely because of anxiety, if the individual has faith, he is able to go back to ordinary life. However, the ordinary life of the individual before the experience of anxiety coupled with faith is different from that ordinary life afterwards. What was before simply a life lived with “ambivalence” becomes a life lived with full-blown existential angst, with deep “equivocation” (1992, 90).
Rose explicitly links freedom to anxiety—and hence to faith. “The art of power is ‘freedom’: how to be always all-ready for anxiety” (1992,
Secular Faith of Gillian Rose 695
87).

grey skin

Grey skinned girl, walking the streets of fire, turning herself into ashes.
Post to post, the vibrance of a wooden lemon, the zest of her own divine hope.
Dust might cover her, for she would rather be unseen,
flowers may, or may not -
The winter shall not be as grey as her, and the men should not ever own,
her light feet.
Gather the world, into heartbreak, ponder around like a mute.
Grey skin girl, where will you go now?
Home is long passed so now you must flee.

who made you this way?
who made you this way?

T/E/N/D/E/R

palanquin

Dear Creature, why is it so different, why is it the same, why do you exist too much?
You are too serious.
Dear Creature, its blissful and its painful and I dont know how to help you.
I didnt come to save you.
Hey Creature, little creature, what lovely eyes you have
Why are you crying? Stop crying! Do I look like christ?

"In Ivan I have lived, in Malina I will be dying"

field notes 2

'I'm just afraid "today" is too much for me, too gripping, too boundless, and that this pathological agitation will be part of my "today" until its final hour'

I had warned him, that I'm no longer subject to his will, that I've changed, from now on I'll treat everyone the way I'm treating him, with immediate retaliation for every breach of contract

Is spirit a form of matter?          Adopt me, embrace me.          the necessity of loss          The faith, the pain, the sorrow of an absent God          'the always already'          Does it end at the logic of essence?         

Are you a lawyer of the empire?

she suffered an invasion of christianity by her judaism

The Vegetative Soul

Ruin

'The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle nor a love object. It is experience itself: neither the abandoned yet still monumental fragment of totality, nor, as Benjamin thought, simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything.'

Derrida.

Angela: Am I pure?

Author: Purity would be as violent as the colour white. Angela is the colour of hazelnut.
I have a great need to live from much poverty of spirit and not have any luxury of soul. Angela is luxury and upsets me. I will move away from her and enter a monastery, which is to say, become poor. I chose today to wear some very old trousers and a torn shirt. I feel good dressed in rags, I am nostalgic for poverty. I ate only fruit and eggs, I refused the rich blood of meat, I wanted to eat only what's born without agony, just blossoming naked like an egg, like the grape.

A Breath of Life, Lispector

She's at it again, fainted
into a whipped up sunned out mass.
Whats she gonna do now, that all her previous advices have gone to pot?

Lightly gathering memories of saw-dust, the smell of it
Poured like cooked sugars, into tiny pyramids.
Peek inside, to find curled up, gathered up bodies
Protecting themselves from the wind and the grain.
She wants to hear it again, the whistle of a wooden instrument
Blown all the way through holes 
that make notes. How she longs to bare her sweet throat
Into the outdoors. Out of her pointed roof.

the monkey on the back, or was it a monkey wrench thrown somehow, or an elephant in the experimental writer's room?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSCQPSrlNbk

you are me

you are my action, my root
and the the only way to go forward.
In being without you, I am doing without being.
You are my pinpoint,
my depth beneath the surface,
my everlasting covenant.
You are my wine, my foot in the ground,
my hunger and my worth.
Without emblem, without symbol
you are me,
without quotation nor abbreviation
you are me,
without sensuality nor distraction
you are me.

أنت أنا أنت فِعلِي, أنت جَذرِي أنت الطريق الوحيد الذي من خلالِهِ أستطيعُ المُضيَّ. في كينونتي مِن دونك أنا أفعلُ من غيرِ أنْ أكونَ. أنت رأسُ إبرَتِي أنت عُمقي تحتَ السّطح وعهديَ الأبديّ. أنت نَبِيذِي وقَدَمِي على الأرْض وجوعي وقيمتي. من دون شعارٍ, من دون رمزٍ أنت أنا, من دون اقتباسٍ ولا اختصارٍ أنت أنا, من دونِ شهوانيّةٍ ولا ولهٍ

You are I You're real, you're a radical You are the only way through which I can go.

What if I loose and love you?

-

Because there is no Isolde in Islam, because there is only sexual ecstasy in the instant, in the ephemeral present, because Muslim death, no matter what they say, is masculine. Because to die, like my grandmother and like so many other women who know instinctively through their struggles and torments, what is a man, one "whose back one never sees," is to die like a man. In Islam all these women, the only ones who are alive right up to the moment they die - in a monotonous transmutation that I am beginning to regret grievously - the dead women become men!
     In this sense death, in Islam, is masculine. In this sense, love, because it is only celebrated in sensual delights, disappears as soon as the first steps of heralded death are danced. The first approach to the sakina, that is to full and pure serenity, is feminine moreover. But after this introduction, which is light as a woman's breath, death seizes the living, living men and women, to plunge them as equals- and suddenly all of them masculine- into abysses inhabited by souls "obedient to God."

Assia Djebar 
So Vast the Prison

I know it was an event because I was unprotected

Survival Pack
Fanny Pack
Nursing Pack
Healing Pack

C.L.

'What is called a beautiful landscape causes me nothing but fatigue. What I like are landscapes of dry and baked earth, with contorted trees and mountains made of rock and with whitish and suspended light. There, yes, a hidden beauty lies. I know that you don't like art either. I was born hard, heroic, alone, and standing. And found my counterpoint in a landscape without picturesqueness and without beauty. Ugliness is my banner of war.'

Clarice 

I don't hear you, so I'll give up

(The arts will save you)

"WE COULD BE SENSATIONAL"

seed

The centre of a silent planet.
A stool perched right in the centre of my house
I sit, and the windows, all around me
Shine the light, so that there is no shying away
now. I am all here! I am all here!
I am a hardrock. I am still.
The troubles I have caused transcend me.
The troubles of irresolution transcend me.
And my heart burns with a love for the core.
Lonely, am I lonely? I cradle myself
like a babe swathed in the purest, most delicate skin
My eyes around, unrecognisable
from the deep cots I used to gaze
through, all the way through
Still, asking no-one but my little fruit, pip, seed heart
resting in my chest, my strawberry organ
at the centre of the universe...

I could drink a case of you

“We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.” 

“The more I anoint the more my mind adheres physically to the mysterious fabric of love.
I am decutie. Worn thin. You know that word?”
― Hélène Cixoux

“An old cardboard box: you think it but you don't say it.
Leftovers, that are swept up and glued together.
I am your alipte, I say, I am your personal trainer and masseuse. I oil you.
But there's no ointment against the bad thoughts and phantasms.”
― Hélène Cixous

“It is essential to exchange the invisible ring for all that we call survival, survive, survivor.”
― Hélène Cixous

Yesterdays field notes

On writing

Obsessive innerness-

thing-that-writes is in a sense the thing-that-is-being-written

the method is often associatorial as with psychoanalysis. The meanings dormant in etymologies, sounds, permutations of letters, slips of the tongue are given creative importance.
SELF, LANGUAGE, MEANINGS, RELATIONS

It is because of this woven structure that Neutre has been referred to as a "chaosmos" The 'uni'verse that it encompasses has two earth and seas of many colours and textures. It is seemingly disorganized clutter of real and non-real beings in complete anachronism.

Neuter derived from the Latin ne-uter, means 'neither one nor the other' but must be understood to mean 'one is not without the other'
This translation rejects the idea of a neuter which would rise above sexual difference towards an undifferentiated totality towards a conception of sexual difference as a clear cut difference.

Reading as a participatory act
decode

soil-growing

If you skip anything, be it a step or a barrier, you're repressing

Skin is more precious than paper

Reading list
Kafka
Stendhal - the characterisation of Parma
Balzac - the girl with the golden eyes
Nathalie Saurraute
Maguerite Duras
Conrad - the heart of darkness


Kafka---- writing should win & so I lose my life

the value of life and the value of writing

throws out words like bait

cultivated like a piece of land

do I have the right to deprive the world of my embrace and to burden it with my writing or scraps???

Advancing in incomprehension

The book of revelations

Everything takes place as if a man had to achieve a precise goal and said to himself "Here is how I must arrange my weapons, my reserves, my supply, considering the resource at my disposal"

You touched me as if I wasn't there. You looked through me. You didn't answer me. You stayed staring.

Which is the greater gift?

Philosophical blind alleys

anxiety is the dizziness of freedom
infinite possibility despite the sinfulness of the world

oh the malaise of being the world!

In our relationship I built you and you built me.

anxiety stems from the subjects constant need to recreate himself, his responsibility to post a future self in the contingency and disorder of his freedom.

trace of the phantoms that might have been precarious

a school of thought which inspires irrelevance

Derrida in Exile

In or out (Cixous)

Lytords Algeria

Displacing Barthes

Estrangete (Kristeva)

Spivaks echo

La chambre Claire

The Motherland

pre-condition without home

YOUR DEATH is going to happen TO ME

Magic House

I want the world of pulses before destiny

realisation

You turn the dust into diamonds
I turn the diamonds into dust...

Please. Speak./ I will die if you don't speak.

At the height of which
Those vowels entangle me
Caressing, cradling, long letters
Warps and wefts, black threads
A minimalist embroiders dream.
And the soothing oval of his opening
closing mouth
Remedies my holes with speech
those worthy of only kindliness,
that fill me with a ringing ease

your own capacity to home me

peering back
the lethargic letter rests,
lay your head!
on the inside of a hip
an elegant line -
the crisp of the middletone
whom makes the soft heart notes
go sensuously through,
the cutting dark consonants,
thick ink fishtail
the curves and kinks

and, as he blinks, subtly,
its like his lashes were feathers,
of twilight chicks half asleep
and he utters casual letters,
of a God sung script.

Oh how I wake in me wakeful sleep
I need the letters to breath, I need the letters to swim!
Are you still with me?
I can't live without your twigs,
your grammar nest and your breath blanket
branching out into little nerve endings,
a b-boat, a c-cot, a d-dorm, and an egg.

These syllables, these sounds

They are protecting me from the never ending loss of the centre.

Oh man who plays, the men who sing! Words, losses

Full of ease, at pleasure, at yours - open door, 
bleeding speech, bending over... keep going
my little hut... your a boat and a parasol, 

and I collapse, sitting lowly, underneath 
the caverns of your speech.

I will die if you don't speak.

“I’M THE VESTAL PRIESTESS of a secret I’ve forgotten”  
Clarice Lispector

I know a woman

'I know a woman who is at second glance an ensemble of five little boys and one little girl. As for the following glances...'

Cixous

One day, when I am a woman and you are a man
or, when you are woman and I am a man
we will make babies.
And, If we be the planets; 
rounded edged cores of impenetrable substance
spun on layers of other worldy fibres
they will be our little solar systems,
shes and hes and hes and shes, 
and she-hes like us. 
extra terrestrial, superhuman, 
sexless, definitive beings.
Roaming - we'll make a 'roaming'
and we'll circle our centres in legendary love.

grey days, forever days

Greyness covers every page
Of a heart
Splattered with black and white ink
A dedication
to black and white
now
to the script of my mourning
and you, I hope,
my eventual destiny.
Now its for making the thing liveable
do-able
under a grey sky
far-far away from home
Untangle the body and live in simplicity
or, some sort
for
the diving day will come
and you will be
truly prepared

you should hope my dear
that the thing you love
should stay alive
or else, you would regret this patience.
Living now on a land run by system
working
stand up and ride the tube land
arrive at destination safely land,
know where your going
and what time your coming home
land
Well
I only have one home now
so
my desexualised body will walk this strange place
and stop, and ponder
the things around
its environmens
its paths

Deep down in its depth though
it will long,
and her real existence will be laying on daggers.
On the surface, dull days and bright days will make grey years
And I shall wait and wait and wait and wait
I should tell you, I'll be waiting in a coma til you come to get me
And then my real life shall begin again
And I shall roam my love, with you, forever.

That's where I belong

"I am only interested in my eyes when they're looking at you."

Parturition, Mina Loy

I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction

The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contradiction
To the pin-point nucleus being

Locate an irritation               without
It is                                       within
                                             Within
It is without
The sensitized area
Is identical               with the extensity
Of intension

I am the false quantity
In the harmony of physiological potentiality
To which
Gaining self-control
I should be consonant
In time

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
Pain calls up in me
The struggle is equal

Isadora Duncan and Sergei Esenin both possess a "superhuman" quality. They rapidly became legendary characters in their own right, defied by some and reviled by others. Their lives may appear enviably heroic or painfully absurd; their complex personal relationship seems to combine elements of epic and tragic.

D O you think I'll dO Okay BABY.
D O you think I'll dO OKAY?

The Socialist

You give your 'love yous' out 
and pour them like potpourri
over the likes of every thorn you ever met
nestle heads and wishes and dreams of exotic days ahead
amoungst the swept up dried up, cuttled, salted heads
and take your florist apron around the town 
and fill it up with bitty pieces and crumpled ends
and by the part of day you may or may not be, 
delighted by your new friends
and harass the dogs and bleach the sacks
be about, you one and only fly
and make a map, of your truce
with whoever it was that put you here
and starved you with your own concoctions
and bled you from your own devotion
to the fleet of bodies all mixed up together
lost in an orgy of 'never coming to get mes'
the muted version of a tale long lost
and a meal long wasted
on a man who won't discriminate
but who too can't distinguish the flavours

BIG LOA CANNOT RIDE little horses

We wear sweaters, together, we wear sweaters. 
We are casual, manifestations of black rimmed plainness, and we love it. We love eachothers faces. Forces, to reckon with. 
And boyish and golden, lets set up base.
A home, a house, without any furniture.
Holding hands, without a care, light as the air.
And sweaters, black sweaters, to move around the town.

Dungarees dungarees,
Dungarees as you please
If you'll be wanting plaited sheath
I'll be wearing dungarees, dungarees

Oh Mina Loy, F word Manifesto

Mina Loy, Feminist Manifesto

Women if you want to realize yourselves-you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval-all your pet illusions must be unmasked—the lies of centuries have got to go—are you prepared for the Wrench–? There is no half-measure—NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition, will bring about Reform, the only method is Absolute Demolition

Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vise-crusades & uniform education-you are glossing over Reality.

Professional & commercial careers are opening up for you—
Is that all you want?

And if you honestly desire to find your level without prejudice—be Brave & deny at the outset—that pathetic clap-trap war cry Woman is the equal of man-
For
She is NOT

The man who lives a life in which his activities conform to a social code which is protectorate of the feminine element—–is no longer masculine

The women who adapt themselves to a theoretical valuation of their sex as a relative impersonality, are not yet Feminine

Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not —–seek within yourselves to find out what you are

As conditions are at present constituted—you have the choice between Parasitism, & Prostitution —-or Negation

Men & women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited for the parasite, the parasite for the exploited—at present they re at the mercy of the advantage that each can take the others sexual dependence—-. The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge—is the sexual embrace.

The first illusion it is to your interest to demolish of women into two classes the mistress, & the mother every well-balanced & developed woman knows that is not true. Nature has endowed the complete functions—-there are no restrictions on the woman who is so incompletely evolved as to be un-self-conscious in sex, will prove a restrictive influence on the temperamental expansion of the next generation; the woman who is a poor mistress will be an incompetent mother—an inferior mentality—& will enjoy an inadequate apprehension of Life.

To obtain results you must make sacrifices & the first and greatest sacrifice you have to make is of your ”virtue”

The fictitious value of a woman as identified with her physical purity—is too easy to stand-by—rendering her lethargic in the acquisition of intrinsic merits of character by which she could obtain a concrete value—-therefore, the fist self-enforced law for the female sex, as a protection of the man made bogey of virtue—which is the principal instrument of her subjection, would be the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty—-.

The value of man is assessed entirely according to his use or interest to the community, the value of woman depends entirely on chance, her success or in success in maneuvering a man into taking the life-long responsibility of her—

The advantages of marriage are too ridiculously ample—
Compared to all other trades—for under modern conditions a woman can accept preposterously luxurious support from a man (with-out the return of an sort—even offspring)—as a thank offering for her virginity.

The woman who has not succeeded in striking that advantageous bargin—-is prohibited from any but surreptitious re-action to Life-stimuli—-&entirely debarred maternity.
Every woman has a right to maternity—-

Every woman of superior intelligence should realize her race-responsibility, in producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex—-

Each child of a superior woman should be the result f a definite period of psychic development in her life—-& and not necessarily of a possible irksome & outworn continuance of an alliance—spontaneously adapted for vital creation n the beginning but not necessarily harmoniously balanced as evolution.

For the harmony of race, each individual should be the expression of an easy & ample interpenetration of th male & female temperaments—free of stress
Woman must become more responsible for the child than man—-
Woman must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved—

The feeling that it is a personal insult when a man transfers his attention from her to another woman

The desire for comfortable protection instead of an intelligent curiosity & courage in meeting & resisting the pressure of life sex or so called love must be reduced to its initial element, honour, grief, sentimentality, pride and & consequently jealousy must be detached from it.
Woman for her happiness must retain her deceptive fragility of appearance, combined with indomitable will, irreducible courage, & abundant health the outcome of sound nerves—
Another great illusion is that woman must use all her introspective and clear-sightedness & unbiased bravery to destroy—for the sake of her self respect is the impurity of sex the realization in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex—except in the mental attitude to it—will constitute an incalculable & wider social regeneration than it is possible for our generation to imagine.

I'll make it, I'll make it back alright.
My limbs aren't lank but they seem to be failing me now.
Thighs that were made for bolting,
Columns full of thunder and might.
But, I'm gathering food from this fight
Enough to pressurise the flight

Food for thought

Your voice girl, is like a body

Dancing, dissolving worries, erasing sorrow,

And your body, my pretty one, is like words,

Words of philosophers who got drunk and forgot time.

How strange!

S O S

Lunar Baedeker

A silver Lucifer

serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones

lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous---

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

---Stellectric signs
"Wing shows on Starway"
"Zodiac carrousel"

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And "Immortality"
mildews...
in the museums of the moon

"Nocturnal cyclops"
"Crystal concubine"
-------
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes---- 

Mina Loy

Mr Rochester.
& the Forgotten Prince

You know that cliche scene where she run run runs, straight into his arms?
Like he was the only man who ever lived and she was the most beautiful woman in the world?

the forgotten prince

"While lying next to you I was thinking how I should've responded earlier. I recalled what you brought out in me last summer and the refuge you provided. I can't answer whether or not there's a 'person' inside but I can say with certainty there is some light in you drawing in all us lowly moths..."

Nourbo

Saubode

abode

Noleebode

bambode

Rania El Hakim

Review: Kamal Khalifa Gallery, Monoprints, Rania El Hakim

A new show by Rania El-Hakim opens at Kamal Khalifa Gallery, Gezira Arts Centre. Simply entitled 'Monoprints' the new works try to capture the 'melange of relationships' encapsulated in the City, relationships that create the energy and vibrancy one may feel simply by walking down a street. El-Hakims Monoprints in this sense share themes with her previous works and exhibits, where by we see her effort to reveal the living being or soul not as a separate entity but as interconnected with the world it inhabits and the people with whom it shares its space.

If the show seeks to capture the contradictory dialogues of city, living; between the moving and the static, the visible and the invisible it does this so softly, so delicately, that each little pocket of colour, on its small square of off white paper makes for its own little peaceful contradiction - the self made miniature landscape is more harmony than flux.

A birds-eye view of a construction site in motion on a desert scape with a docking station where boats are just beginning to set a sail, sometimes the emblem of a snake appears, and a satellite station watches the movements of beings, who are all but little dots on an abstracted map of town. Do we spot artillery? Is this place preparing for something? Is it all about to go off?

The tracking system with its bleeping digital clock takes us down to ancient ruins and back up to the end of another day and the quieting down of its metropolis. What is so prevalent though is the sense of civilization that occurs within each frame, the vibrations of scurrying human existence - an ant farm - is mapped only through movement and time. Abstracted shapes create areas of settlement, buildings, tracks, seedbeds, gravel – walked through, dirt stains, blood blots and traces of fine hairs.

Skins of the earth.

Though we talk of the human soul as the one which is looking for balance, here the artist in question is mark-making in a way that appears undomestic; like a creature of another species scratching at the surface, proving his existence, making himself vital, searching for food and asking to survive. Repetitively each print is signed in pencil together with a small text marking them each 1/1 (one of one), matching the title of the show; the mono print is a one off, a moment which has passed and will not be replicated. The artist describes the works as painting, and this is justifiable since the print making process has been edited, overlaid, patched up and in places even eliminated and scratched out. Earthy tones are aligned and misaligned with blocks and patches of inky pigments, a bright blue, a fluorescent yellow, is dynamite in this otherwise still-scape.

Ask me where I have been, 

what I have done, 

who I have seen

I will tell you, 

'what I have done', 

'where I have been' and 

'who I have seen'

Take my breath
and recycle it
for your used up 
respiratory system
I have plenty.

Wake up 'sister'!
Like a brat on a stick.

/səˈkəm/

Verb

There are no Captions!

AlexandRA.

Its time to pick it apart.
To make that exploration.
To be in touch with what is, 
or all that you will ever know of this place.
Its time to keep the sand in the hand, and use it for production purposes...
However thinly you may have spread it there before...
Its time to get up.
And write it. Write it down down soldier.
You are, you are, you are.
You are entitled 
to build - so knock down the thought of anyone who won't let you
(on purpose, or dimly not so)
And
You are you are
AlexandRA. 

K

Whenever I am scared of new beginnings, or anxious about unfamiliar grounds, whether in love or friendship, work or geography, I think of Kamilya and a number of other women. They, at different stages in their lives, have burned the bridges of comfort and went off towards further living, more intense. They have accepted the loses but celebrated the gains. These women are my heroes.

Helene Cixous: This procedure [demarche] of truth is for me the gift you

give to humanity. In reading you we learn that the truth is always a bit further on. From the place where you arrive, you set off again, you take

yourself back up, you relaunch yourself, you do not sit the truth on your knees. Truth makes you tick [La verite tefait marcher] in all the senses of the word. It's also the law of writing: one can only write in the direction of that which does not let itself be written and which one must try to write. What I can write is already written, it is no longer of interest. I always head towards the most frightening. This is what makes writing thrilling but painful. I write towards what I flee. I dream about it. It is

always a jardin d'Essai, but it is an infernal, expelling garden.

the greed is the unraveling

Sensuality often makes love grow too quickly, so that the root remains weak and is easy to pull out