(INTERMEDIATE) SPACES OF INSECURITY

Excerpt from text by Susanna Baumgartner

Rana Elnemr engages with urban landscapes in a variety of media. The artist examines historical and contemporary webs of relations in her works—relations between people, but also people’s relationship to the animals, plants, objects, and (artistic) materials in their surroundings. Recent works by the artist furthermore negotiate the embeddedness of humans in cosmic dimensions. She is interested in exposing urban layers and stories in Cairo, where she lives, with regard to voids and intermediate spaces. I would like to describe Rana Elnemr’s artistic practice, which also includes the cooperative designing of exhibitions, with the notion of the rhizome, as formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The “fascicular root,”2 the rhizome as a non-hierarchical and decentral system, is distinguished by numerous connections that repeatedly emerge anew and in different ways. The diversity and lack of a limiting unity or uniformity engendered in this way are further features of the rhizome, according to Deleuze and Guattari. Rana Elnemr creates works and series of works that she develops further over longer periods of time and in doing so refrains from pursuing an invariable, pre-given course. With her interdisciplinary practice, she weaves communication levels, sculptural elements, video, and photography to visual essays. In the process, she creates an interplay between formal-aesthetic layers, which she manually superimposed, photographed and in some cases digitally processed in her studio, and their levels of meaning. At first glance, the openness of the works can cause insecurity and a loss of orientation. Very much in the sense of the rhizome, the individual works can then also be related to each other anew and via different points. 3 With the continuation and new assembly of the series of works entitled riparian, Rana Elnemr responds to the STUDIO of the Kunsthalle Mannheim. Meadows near a river are characterized by the meeting of water and riverside landscape. This encounter of two elements is similar to the architectural element of the shaft that the work alludes to, which lets light enter into the artist’s residence and studio and the houses in the immediate vicinity. It is not only light that can enter the building through these square openings—they are also the supply channels of the buildings, so to speak: Water rises through pipes, rain falls through these gaps in the roofs, air flows meet.