Page 153 - Ahmed Ragab Sakr
P. 153
ust to Dust: Excavating Detritus - The video works of Ahmed Sakr
Ahmed Sakr delves with his viewers into a visual culture laboratory, scrutinizing herme-
neutically the various meanings of collective memory, collective identity and collective
“everything-ness”.
Like a scientist who adopts the methods of Rene Descartes, the father of scientific think-
ing, Sakr “kidnaps” his viewers into a personal space of collected footage, scrutinizing
three-decades of deja-vu television material that shaped the collective perceptions of --at
least-two generations, particularly “generation X” of which he belongs, a generation that
has, to this day, choreographs and swims between globalization, corporate-hegemony,
innovation, technology, harsh economy and urban commuting.
In his –sometimes-- rather direct narrative, Sakr invades directly the idea by his cuts and
assemblages of the local television material, a material that always had “a very local” es-
sence, known to every Arabic speaking citizen of the 22 Arabic speaking countries, who
can understand and communicate with the Egyptian local dialect. Sakr’s straightforward-
ness is accentuated and enhanced by his choice of “narrators”, his vocal heroes who are
all contributors across time to the cultural specificity of the land. To integrate the mes-
sages with aesthetics, the film material is double layered: the foundation layer is always
the authentic television footage, while a second filter layer of sand / mud / dust / earth
covers the footage to hint the notion of age / time.
In a second closed-loop film work, a hand touches the earth, be it sand or mud, another
straight forward message of the complete cycle of the beginning and the end. The work
-in its repeated and almost obsessive looping-is almost mesmerizing, and drives the
viewer towards her / his own memory dwells.
Khaled Hafez
2019
151
Ahmed Sakr delves with his viewers into a visual culture laboratory, scrutinizing herme-
neutically the various meanings of collective memory, collective identity and collective
“everything-ness”.
Like a scientist who adopts the methods of Rene Descartes, the father of scientific think-
ing, Sakr “kidnaps” his viewers into a personal space of collected footage, scrutinizing
three-decades of deja-vu television material that shaped the collective perceptions of --at
least-two generations, particularly “generation X” of which he belongs, a generation that
has, to this day, choreographs and swims between globalization, corporate-hegemony,
innovation, technology, harsh economy and urban commuting.
In his –sometimes-- rather direct narrative, Sakr invades directly the idea by his cuts and
assemblages of the local television material, a material that always had “a very local” es-
sence, known to every Arabic speaking citizen of the 22 Arabic speaking countries, who
can understand and communicate with the Egyptian local dialect. Sakr’s straightforward-
ness is accentuated and enhanced by his choice of “narrators”, his vocal heroes who are
all contributors across time to the cultural specificity of the land. To integrate the mes-
sages with aesthetics, the film material is double layered: the foundation layer is always
the authentic television footage, while a second filter layer of sand / mud / dust / earth
covers the footage to hint the notion of age / time.
In a second closed-loop film work, a hand touches the earth, be it sand or mud, another
straight forward message of the complete cycle of the beginning and the end. The work
-in its repeated and almost obsessive looping-is almost mesmerizing, and drives the
viewer towards her / his own memory dwells.
Khaled Hafez
2019
151
