Flouting the summer retrospective tradition, Ubuntu Gallery staged a new show of Nada Mobarak’s work on 20 June. Entitled “What Shall We Do Now”, the exhibition features mixed media on canvas portraits evoking a meditative stillness.
Born in Rome in 1975, the self-educated artist is a political science graduate of the American University in Cairo with an MSc in development management from the London School of Economics. A 25-year development career preceded her decision to take up painting, when she joined the workshop of the late Maged Al-Sigini.
“After many years in administration,” she told me, “I felt I was burnt out and ready to dedicate my entire day for art. I have been drawing since a very early age, but I decided to make this shift only last year. Being a self-educated artist is a mixed blessing. The freedom it gives you is great, but you end up being stuck with the one technique you learn from your master. In order to find your own artistic imprint, you need to work by yourself to unlearn what you have been taught.”
The artist’s passion for her previous career, which revolved around political and social development, has had an impact on her work. It can be seen in her compassion for marginal people, for example.
“What Shall We Do Now” is a phrase “that has been resonating in my mind for the past 25 years. It was a moment of struggle in a story I was reading and there was no clear answer. What I am going to do now? But I think of it now as a collective question, because the future is so unclear.”
The first piece in the exhibition is a sketch of a flower. “Even when it withers and dies, it dies beautifully.” Due to dissatisfaction with the painting and the need to rework it, as she explains, the style is layered with strong brush strokes, resulting in a unique richness. In addition to the beautiful figurative charcoal and acrylic paintings, the exhibition includes 24 small water colour still lives of birds-of-paradise, revealing the powerful colours and movement in the petals.
The larger paintings depict the relationship between birds-of-paradise and various characters meditating, praying, or at rest, but in this case the flowers are withered and the figures hold them as though clinging to hope. The metaphor of the flower, Mobarak says, relates to its name: “We don’t live in a paradise. It is a truly harsh moment in our collective history. However, simultaneously, the flower is a symbol for freedom many of us aspire to.” In addition to their magnificent cheerful colours, birds-of-paradise, native to south Africa, denote joy, freedom and glamour. There traces of the flower’s orange and purple in Mobarak’s palette but, though “the flower is inspiring in many ways,” the artist says, “I don’t actually work according to plan. My work is completely organic and my palette is totally spontaneous.”
The artist is keen on giving the paintings meaningful titles. “I think that the title completes the painting. It is as if I am telling a story and encouraging the viewer to relate more to the artwork.”
Silence depicts an old Nubian man in a white gown. Sitting on a chair reading a book with the flower laid on his thighs, his eyes are hidden behind his glasses. In Whisper It, a short-haired young woman stands on a small rug, praying with no scarf on her head, in a moment of true connection with the divinity. I Will Not See shows a boy sitting on the edge of a boat, holding a flower in his hand, his eyes closed as if dreaming of immigration. In Birds of Paradise three young men, with their back to the viewer, are sitting on a rock the flower is falling to one side of them. Queue takes the metaphor further with two soldiers holding flowers instead of rifles, and regarding the flower as if it had the power to transform personal and national defeats to brilliant victories.
These are large paintings, over 150 cm long on at least one side, but throughout the exhibition the setting is unclear. The backgrounds are a plain light colour, and there are no clues beyond the postures and actions of the figures.
Mobarak’s first solo exhibition, “Look Them in the Eye,” was held at Ubuntu in 2022. It was an “invitation for people to stop and reflect on how difficult life had become for the average person, to acknowledge their existence.”
In a creative contradiction, the following exhibition depicted people with concealed eyes. This was plan, since “my first exhibition led to the second. Two years had passed and left us all suffering one way or another. I actually wanted to convey certain emotions with the least facial expressions so that the viewer would concentrate on a neck, shoulder, or the movement of the head, and get the message in a different way. This is not just about our social-economic problems. Our neighbourhoods have changed. The trees in the streets have disappeared and the environment is not the same,” she added.
“I have a great passion for flowers and plants. I have a small balcony full of plants, and I buy flowers every week. My eyes are saturated with the beautiful and inspiring colours and shapes of flowers, especially birds-of-paradise and lilies, and it breaks my heart every time I see a tree being cut down.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 July, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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