Egyptian artist, Amal Kenawy concentrated in Cairo, at the Institute of Cinema of the Academy of Arts, then at the School of Fine Arts in 1999.
Amal Kenawy communicates her thoughts through figures, video movements, drawings, installations or performances and deals with subjects such as memory, dreams, detention or passage, with a brutal worm woven of images, which unites contrary energies to ruin our assumptions.
His most memorable works were made with his brother, Abdel Ghani Kenawy, between 1997 and 2002: they are essentially sculptures and installations, derived from constructivist structures or plans, and whose structures truly include the viewer.
These works play on the differentiation between the blur of metal and the chiaroscuro of sails.
From 2002 onwards, she has marked her works alone, occasionally with a video attached to a performance, which summon up the question of constrained marriage.
In relation to a butterfly caught in a net, dressed in a white dress, a woman weaves beads and trimmings on a heart of flesh, while the artist duplicates the signal on a life-size acephalous model placed in front of the screen.
Her animated film “The Purple Artificial Forest” takes up this strange mixture by mixing different recurring themes in her work: insect figures, cut-out organs, purple liquid evoking blood.
Courtesy Fundação Sindika Dokolo,
© Amal Kenawy
In the installation, video “Booby Trapped Heaven“, the speckled schedule of a small plane is placed on the back of a motionless lady, confronting a scene that seems like a railway adventure. Reiterating the aspiration of many Africans to move, this video additionally communicates the possibility of repression, that of an anxious home that is perhaps, in any case, already confessed in itself.
Rich and mutable, Amal Kenawy‘s work frames the weakness of creatures, on the line between dream and reality, verse and brutality.
Amal Kenawy passed away at 38 years old from leukemia.