Not Entirely Red: Faika Al Hassan's Exploration Of Identity

The circular movement of Faika Al Hassan’s paintbrush in motion and the red colours she was using while painting The Universe of a City reminded the artist of the fez, the traditional Moroccan hat of Ottoman origin. Shaped either as a truncated cone or a short cylinder, it is made either of red felt or kilim fabric, and is inextricably linked to not only its hometown of Fez, but the whole of Morocco as well. ‘I began to recall my memories of Cairo, and how fascinated I was with the fez that I used to see a lot at Khan El Khalili’, says Al Hassan.
The major souk in Cairo’s Islamic district, the Khan El Khalili, dates back to the 14 th century and provides the perfect setting for the visualisaton of the contemporary Middle East. Celebrated in Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947 novel, Midaq Alley, it’s imbued with wild eroticism, restlessness, a state of permanent wakefulness, and the melancholy of a past half-passed, and half unable to pass. Here too the history of the fez as a singular object is noteworthy. It was first made fashionable in the 17th century by the Moors in Fez, and was later introduced into the Ottoman Empire in 1826, as a means of replacing the traditional turban. From its original usage associated with the Ottoman military, the fez spread throughout the Empire and beyond, to Cyprus, Greece, the Balkans, as well as Muslim communities in South Asia, among other regions.
As the artist notes: ‘they used to be worn as a sign of respect … the idea of the fez ‘solidified’ while visiting my best friend last year in Damascus. I commissioned the best craftsman in the industry to make around one hundred and twenty fez pieces in the traditional style, and then cover each one with the white solid paint that is ground to cover canvas. This all happened before the uprising in Syria, and as a result of countless experimentations and tests. All the pieces were then sent to me, and thus I began the journey of my exhibition, titled Not Entirely Red.’

Al Hassan paints objects – in this case, depicting the fez in paintings, and painting on fezzes – not so that they serve as mere adornments, but with the intention of interpreting and understanding the spaces surrounding them. When the artist, a Baghdad-trained economist by profession, took up painting lessons at the Bahrain Arts Society – the usual pathway for Bahraini artists in the absence of a proper art school – she began experimenting with the traditional genres of painting (i.e. still life and landscape) taught in the Arab world. However, since Hidden, her first solo exhibition in 2007 at Albareh Gallery, she has developed a particularly unique style. It’s novel in its use of symbolism, lying somewhere between expressionist and abstract, yet it still retains a figurative quality in its employment of delicate lines and shapes. Such elements reveal their true forms, and bring to the forefront archetypes, everyday objects, and thoughts, rather than simply images.

The small object worlds that appear over and over in the pieces in Al Hassan’s Not Entirely Red reflect simultaneity in thoughts being shaped by objects and objects being shaped by thoughts. The fez isn’t merely an object here, but rather something fully immersed in the space wherein it happens to appear – a mirror of thought and contradiction; and is contradiction not the basis of everything that is rich about human thought? The painted fez mirrors what we would see if one could peer into someone’s thoughts by a gesture as effortless as uncovering their head; yet, these thoughts appear in a world of shared meaning, where we exist together with others – that is, the small figurines that characterise Al Hassan’s paintings. ‘They are either moving together in a group, or in different directions, meaning that they might not share the same opinions or views. I often ask in my dreams why people do not live together peacefully’, she says.
There is no pure space here that can be seen or judged from a distance; rather, one has to become immersed in the painting, to replace mere resemblance or representation – of a woman, landscape, hat, anything – with the feeling of its lived experience: the experience of an unfinished world. At the same time, however, there seems to be little or no arbitrariness in her work. The very large-scale paintings – some of which are as high as four metres – are coherent compositions in uniform strokes.
It is a rarity in the Middle East – and particularly in the Gulf – for a woman painter to complete the whole journey from landscape and still life to expressionist and abstract styles, and although she is not the only painter of her kind in Bahrain – being in the company of such distinguished artists as Rashid Al Khalifa, Balqees Fakhro, and Omar Al Rashid, for instance – contemporary art from the tiny island kingdom remains largely unspoken of.
Modern paintings are like a field of objects which approach one only one at a time, and whose totality is unlikely to be digested in one glance. Paintings require many eyes, many perspectives, many details and associations that carry deeper relationships. These are what Faika Al Hassan’s paintings provide and they appear as continuously unfinished works, born the moment they’re gazed upon. In the words of Merelau-Ponty, ‘Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible – painting blurs all our categories, spreading out before us its dreamy universe of carnal essences, efficacious resemblances, muted meanings’.
By Ari Amaya-Akermann

Originally Published in ReOrient