Guest Digital Curator – Nazir Tanbouli | The Future of the Ancient World

Guest Digital Curator – Nazir Tanbouli

NAZIR TANBOULI
Nazir is an artist, born in Alexandria, Egypt. He studied at the Alexandria Faculty of Fine Art. He has been based in the UK – the East Midlands and London – since 2002.

Read Nazir’s essay Egyptians between official and unofficial here.

I find the shapes of these birds and various other animals very interesting. They are not what most people regard as “Egyptian style;” they are very simple and some might say naive, yet they have their own bloodline within Egyptian History. This style has always been present on the Egyptian street, and is part of the Egyptian visual culture, yet it has never been officially in the foreground of what we regard as Egyptian art. These shapes have found their way across dynasties; they exist within Coptic iconography, and are depicted on oriental rugs and carpets made in little villages around Sakkara. Last and certainly not least, the shapes recur in the famous Islamic sugar figurines which Muslim children buy and eat on religious occasions, to the day. See more here, here, and here. This simple and basic style has survived persistently across eras; cutting across class, religious and regional divides; and that is why it should be recognized as Egyptian art .

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The name of the game TREK TRAK comes from the sound that it creates when you play it: you are supposed to put the small piece on the ground then hit it with the stick on the wedgy part. It makes the sound “TREK” and flips in the air a couple of feet. Thats when you hit it across with the long stick and it makes the sound “TRAK.”

If you managed to hit it twice, you get the point and you play a second turn. It wasn’t a toy you would buy in the shop in my time; we used a wooden ruler as the stick and half a wooden washing peg for the small part. We played endlessly, every day. When you come to think about it, this game is an early stage of training that allowed Egyptians to maintain their main wooden stick skills, such as stick dancing and stick fighting.

The Egyptian name of this fish – tilapia – is bolti, – it is the most common, best loved Nile fish. It’s dark grey with pink and green shades. Egyptians love to eat it on Friday; on that day, all the streets smell of bolti on the grill. The story goes that when Osiris was cut into pieces by his brother, Seth and his body parts were scattered around in different locations, Isis had to travel around and collect them and it took her a bit of time. She managed to collect every part except his penis. That was a big problem because Egyptians believed that the body shall not be brought back to life unless it was intact, so she started another search for the missing member, which was consumed by a fish. She had to find the fish in question, and when she did, Osiris was brought back to life for a very brief period and Isis got pregnant with Horus. That was supposed to have taken place on Friday. Whether on not we care about the story, the fact is that right up to the present time it’s custom to eat this fish on Friday, and Egyptians have always considered eating fish on Friday to have a sexual reference.

This vase is my answer to all those who might accuse me of “copying Picasso.” Ilove Picasso, but this style comes naturally to me. You could label any orther artist a Picasso-wannabe, but when it comes to Egyptian artists, we are merely revisiting ourcultural heritage – which Picasso obviously studied – when creating similar objects.