Amal Kenawy
born 1974 in Egypt
Her interdisciplinary work combines video, installation, sound, and performance challenging viewers to partake in deeply personal journeys that often venture into emphatic socio-cultural critiques. Died in 2012.
A woman in a wedding dress, wearing lace gloves, conducts “surgery” on a beating heart. The organ responsible for the essential life functions, the symbol of life and love, is adorned with tiny beads, ribbons and pieces of lace. The title refers therefore to the real space, the site of this mysterious, symbolic operation, yet it also refers to confinement, to the cage from which a butterfly tries to escape in the next scene.
Confronting the key moments of human life, such as birth, marriage and death, the work is devoted to fear, desire, and violence that are a part of the human existence. On a more specific level, “The Room” portrays the tying of the knot as the moment of negotiating one’s own autonomy and independence.
