Youssef Nabil's website - Ambivalent Cosmopolitan

Ambivalent Cosmopolitan
by Jessica Winegar

I want you to know.

I'm gonna be a big, bright shining star.

That's what I want and what I'm gonna get.

In the course of art history, artists have used the genre of self-portraiture to claim and promote the creator's worldly status. Alternatively, self-portraits have been a vehicle for self-exploration, for researching emotions and the past and creating from them a visual narrative of self. One tradition is extroverted, the other introspective. One is often seen as less authentic, a selfish promotion of the artist. The other is usually viewed as the paragon of authenticity, the epitome of the modernist enterprise of tortured self-reflection. But what happens when an artist uses the glamorizing elements of self-portraiture in order to examine one's life and existence?

In his recent work, Youssef Nabil marries these seemingly contradictory traditions of the genre and in doing so reveals their similarities, especially the ways that artistic introspection, for any well-known artist, must take into account the phenomenon of fame and worldliness that they live

with. Nabil explores and narrates his story in the visual language of cosmopolitanism. The result is a conflicted narrative of the cosmopolitan artist, in which one's ability to travel around the world like a movie star appears on the surface to be an invigorating exciting experience but is sometimes more like the prelude to death – an exhausting process of wandering and wondering. At a time when exilic rootlessness is celebrated by the avant-garde wary of fixed gender, ethnic, and national identities, Nabil provides a sobering look at the realities of the cosmopolitan life by carefully examining its potentialities and its problems. The cosmopolitan artist claims to want to be a star, but shows that the bright star light has the capacity to blind.

We can see this ambivalent cosmopolitanism emerging in Nabil's portraits, for which he is most well-known. His hand-colored photographs of popular stars of movies, pop music, dance, and the international visual art scene often call forth film stills of the 1930s and 1940s, especially when the subjects appear in luxuriously staged studio settings striking a certain pose. Many of these images convey a nostalgia for a bygone cosmopolitan era – one before strident nationalisms and fundamentalisms rendered this kind worldliness suspect. The staging of contemporary stars in the poses, settings, and colors of this earlier era are not only nostalgic, but reinvigorate these signs of sophistication for the present. They are the part of Nabil's oeuvre that is inspired by his early love of classic Egyptian cinema. But other images of these international figures reveal a darker side of glamour and fame. These are the images of anxiety, death, or threats of it. The artist Ghada Amer lies face down, splayed across one of her works, the threads resembling streams of blood, giving the whole image the effect of a murder scene. Tracey Amin's legs in cowboy boots stand in front of her Egyptian bag on the floor, communicating a state of transient waiting. Amina Mansour looks

creepishly out from a cotton burial. In the portraits of older artists, one senses a desire to capture them for eternity. Indeed, speaking of his work with public icons, the artist says, "I wanted to meet these people before they die or before I die."

This incipient ambivalence of the cosmopolitan life appears more dramatically in Nabil's new self-portraits. The artist's 2003 departure from Egypt, his country of birth, was the impetus for turning the camera on himself. Going about the world for various exhibitions and projects, Nabil says he finds himself "away from all the things I was used to," spending "a lot of time with myself." In this sense, these works are an examination of the self in the same vein as other modernist self-portraiture. But it is a search that consciously uses the language of cosmopolitanism, along with a tinge of the deathly elegance that characterizes his portraits of stars. Thus, alongside the narrative of the allure and privilege of travel is the narrative of not belonging, of always feeling like he "will be leaving one day…coming to a place that is not yours then having to go." As Nabil investigates the pleasure and pain of the nomadic existence, he also glamorizes and deadens it. The glamour is in the death, and vice-versa.

The ambivalence of the cosmopolitan life comes forth in many ways. Moving through the images is like being on a fancy jet. His titles tell us we are now in France, now Austria, now Spain, Italy, Brazil, Cuba. We see Nabil looking at sunsets in Rio and Sardinia, at the harbors of Naples and Havana, in the Paris streets, in a church in Vienna. The hand-painted colors on some of the images place them in the realm of travel postcards or 1930s and 40s film stills again, giving everything a

rosy glow. In these ways, the work is a contemporary version of the status-claiming, wealth-displaying tradition of self-portraiture. Yet, in images like "Self Portrait, Barfleur 2005" and "Hope to die in my sleep, self portrait Viñales 2005," Nabil looks like he's dead or dying. In "It's a short road, self portrait Paris 2005," he looks anxiously away from the camera. In many of the works he's unclothed. We see just a back, a refusal to engage with the viewer. This is not exactly the glamorous cosmopolitanism of the artists and singers who are featured in his other works.

The ambivalence is also marked by the artist's relationship to light in the works, with the light playing an enchanting yet simultaneously peculiar or even ghostly role. In "Funfair, self portrait, Paris, 2005," Nabil stands in front of a ferris wheel lit up against the night sky. It is a scene of merriment in the background, but a hooded Nabil looks melancholically out of the frame, beyond the camera. A fireplace fire, the symbol of warmth, radiates in the background of "Self portrait next to the fire, Paris 2004." But Nabil lays on the ground in front of it, muscles tensed, arms crossed, looking intensely at the floor. An antique nightstand light glows in "Hope to die in my sleep...," revealing through beautifully diaphanous mosquito netting the sleeping subject – about to die or already dead. On the Rio beach in "Self portrait with the sunset, Rio de Janeiro 2005," Nabil looks off at a warm red sunset, but then the light on his skin and the tree beside him is from the other direction, with an eerily cold, fluorescent, almost morgue-like quality. In "Autumn self portrait, Paris 2004" Nabil is lying in dead leaves, looking at a small lantern – a kind of light one associates with night watchmen of yesteryear. The contrast between light and dark/death, merriment and melancholy, and between warmth and cold gives these self-portraits a tension that is not often found

in self-portraiture, which often tends to be either boastfully positive or, in the modern era especially, only dark and brooding.

The life of the cosmopolitan may be the life of a star, but the light can also blind, can render the self unseen. In "Big, bright shining star, Madrid 2002," the artist shields his eyes and camera from the light, showing not his flesh but his shadow. And in "Sun in my eyes, self portrait, Sardinia 2005," the camera looks upwards towards the subject, deifying him into a nude Adonis, but at the same time the profusion of light actually hides the details of his form. In these works, Youssef Nabil not only reworks the tradition of self-portraiture. He also shows the darkness in the light of the cosmopolitan life.

Jessica Winegar

Philadelphia, 2007

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