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Good evening. Welcome to the first segment of my lectures on the theme of African artists in the Age of the Big Man.

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In the first lecture, you will recall I examined the concept of the big man as a figure of power in post-war and for the most part,

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post-colonial Africa. And I noted how a view of the politics associated with Africa's big men might inform a new appreciation

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of the diverse work produced by the continent's artists during the second half of the 20th century.

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Today I go to Egypt to revisit the dramatic transformation of the country by a group of army officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser,

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who carried out a successful military coup that subsequently turned into a revolution of immense consequence to the nation.

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Africa. The region.

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And post war global politics. I consider the response of leading artists in Egypt with a focus on Gatsby,

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a series we see on the left to trace the widespread production of revolutionary national culture and the evolution of an

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artistic imagination within that momentous context of what has been called the blessed movement led by the charismatic Nasser.

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Between 1952. And 1970.

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But first. In my introductory lecture,

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I noted that I shall dedicate subsequent ones to people who have played a

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foundational role in the making of my career as an art critic and art historian.

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Today I acknowledge two people.

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First is the critic and cultural activist Tony Aquino show, who on my arrival in Lagos in 1990 after graduation from Sooka,

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introduced me to the city's art world and to his circle of friends.

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My career as an art critic could not have taken off without turning one of the city's finest art critics and literary writers.

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Thanks to Toyin. I participated along with four other friends in the making in 1991 of the Committee for Relevant Art.

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Which is still possibly Nigeria's foremost an independent cultural advocacy platform.

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The second person is currently Ajibade Day, who as art editor of the news magazine African Concord,

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provided me regular opportunity to publish art criticism.

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Fresh from college.

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Conley trusted me enough and helped me develop a confident voice that became the foundation for my work as a critic and later art historian.

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To both men. I am forever grateful. And with that, I turn to today's lecture.

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Let me begin with this painting by Hamid Weiss titled Nasser and the Nationalisation of the Canal dated 1957.

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A rather awkwardly composed, yet highly legible work.

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This oil on canvas shows the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, addressing a crowd of admirers.

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Although the faces on the lower right foreground show a diverse range of men and women indicated by different skin tones and shades.

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They lack individual uniqueness and seem quite generic, as if the point is simply to signal the miscellany of gender,

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race, age and social class of the crowd gathered around the speaker.

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The flatness of the composition, moreover, ensures that every face, whether near the front or far behind,

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seems to press forward with equal pictorial potency, as though to emphasise the crowd's collectivity of purpose.

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Of the prominent heads and faces in the foreground, three are women.

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In fact, the only one that stands out visually is that of the woman with dark, long hair.

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Her face lit up in obvious delight at whatever the speaker is saying.

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It may even be that ecstatic expression is induced not so much by the words of Nasser, as by proximity to the mighty magnetic aura.

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For she, like everyone else, including the soldier in black beret, clearly in thrall of Nasser,

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who appears to have just sprouted from among the masses in magical embodiment and representation of their collective desire and vision.

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At the top right section, we see a partial view of a ship and the blue waters of the Nile.

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This painting is no doubt a record of the events that defined post-war international politics.

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And that is the momentous announcement by Nasser on July 26, 1956,

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declaring the nationalisation of the strategic Suez Canal the vital artery of global trade long controlled by Britain and France,

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thus instantly becoming the most admired and powerful ruler in Africa, the Arab world, and the soon to be formed Non-Aligned Movement.

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The four elements in this painting, that is the crowds, the gesturing,

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a gun to a laser, the ship and the Nile in the way that the artists compose them.

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Not only mark an event that defined Egyptian independence from European powers,

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they also and practically tell of the apotheosis of Nasser and of his confirmation as Egypt's post-colonial sovereign.

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Big man. Four years before the event painted by Weiss on July 22, 1952.

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Nasser and a group of military men who call themselves free officers carried out a successful coup, dethroned and exiled King Fouad,

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and went about transforming the country from a feudal constitutional monarchy, still beholden to Britain to a social democratic republic.

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Wildly popular. The officers soon won the support of Egyptian masses and intellectual elite,

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soon turned the coup into a de facto revolution with the promulgation of land reforms.

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Plans for a new constitution, reorganisation of party politics and a much more muscular opposition to British occupation of the Canal region.

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By 1953, however, Nasser had marginalised his office colleagues, banned all political parties, created a one party state,

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and set to the business of consolidating his political power as head of state and leader of the most important nation in the Arab world.

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An assassination attempt in October 1954 by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood gave

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Nasser all the opportunity he needed to systematically suppress the political,

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the powerful group and vanquish all opposition, including, as I'll return to shortly.

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The influential Egyptian feminists. Turning his sights to the unfinished business of British and French colonial authorised control of the Suez Canal.

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Nasser compelled withdrawal of British troops from the canal in 1954 and in 1956 nationalised it.

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To fund his most important modernist project, the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

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The subsequent invasion of Egypt by France, Britain and Israel and their withdrawal following US opposition.

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Left Egypt an economically weakened but immensely proud nation under its powerful ruler and charismatic leader of the Arabs,

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Africa and the future Non-Aligned Movement.

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In celebration of the Suez Canal position, the country's greatest singer and firm supporter of Nasser Uncle Tomb,

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popularly called the First Lady of Egypt and star of the East,

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performed a militant song In Praise of the Revolution, a song that soon became the country's national anthem.

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I now come to this. Towards the end of my lecture.

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In fact, not terrorism had become an international movement synonymous with pan-Arabism,

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a political ideology that centred the unity and interests of the fractious Arab world and the Decolonising continent's.

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Pan-Africanism. As such by 1957, when a wise created this painting.

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Nasser was at the height of his powers.

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As he shaped Egypt, according to his personal vision as a one party state and social democracy.

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But he was not alone among contemporary Egyptian artists to come under the sway of NASA's charismatic power.

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Another artist, Gamal Elsa Gagne, who, like the Weiss, was a member of the Group of Modern Art.

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I will come to this later. To which Seri belonged.

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Depicted nationalists and revolutionaries subject matter with a form of language that straddled pharaonic Egyptian imagery and modernist figuration.

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Two sculptures by him. One from 1957 showing a seated mother aged suckling two children and the other from 1960,

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a portrait of Nasser as a modern pharaoh and protector of flower bearing child life.

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Figures of the worker, soldier and cleric, in a way, speaks to the extent to which the big man and the state had more or less become the same.

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In fact, the image of Nasser as the guardian of the nation will soon go Continental.

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In 1966. Organisation of African Unity Summit in Addis Ababa.

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General Ankrah, the Ghanaian new head of state.

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Despite being a few years older than Nasser announced to him.

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What? All of us in Africa consider you as our father a quote.

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Well, Nasser was said to have baulked at such a high level theatrical expression of reverence.

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But I have my doubts about that, if only because much of his post 1952 Korea was singularly targeted at becoming the leader of Africa,

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the Arab world, and the Non-Aligned Movement.

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But one thing is clear, and that is that Nasser courted and secured mass support for his domination of Egyptian,

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Arab and African politics with his strong presence on the global stage at midcentury.

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And these are some of the few time covers dedicated to Nasser during this period.

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And he did that through his land reforms, disbandment of the monarchy, nationalisation of the economy,

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and reanimation of a new sovereign imaginary centred on the modern subject and the nation.

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All these guaranteed by the sheer force of his personal charisma.

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And total control of state bureaucracy.

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But just as his and the nation's story is one of triumphs and defeats, sections of the professional class,

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including the very artists and feminists that supported the Nasserist regime, were riven by intermittent bouts of revolutionary fervour.

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And disillusionment. And as no one among the country's leading contemporary artists whose work affords us a more compelling view of the history.

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Than that of. Gatsby? Asked Siri.

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Gaza City was one of the first Egyptian artists to express, through her work enthusiastic support of the political program of the three officers,

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to a large extent because of their pledge to advance women's right to vote and to address sexist

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labour and family laws against which the Egyptian Feminist Union had campaigned since the 1920s.

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This feminist motivation, combined with her active involvement in a group of modern art,

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made her particularly receptive to the three officer's revolutionary rhetoric.

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To appreciate the significance of these two affiliations to sit serious political consciousness.

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And more specifically, her response to NASA's impact on what it meant to be Egyptian at mid-century.

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Let me paint a broad picture first of the history and politics of the country's feminist movement,

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and second of the group of modern art to which she belonged.

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Founded in 1923 by Huda Qaradawi.

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The Egyptian Feminist Union was as much interested in advancing the modern idea of the new woman,

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as did their counterparts in the International Women's Alliance.

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But they were more committed to advocating the end of the Haram culture.

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Polygamy and divorce by repudiation.

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While the removal of the veil, which for the West was the most visible sign of Arab women's oppression,

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was never officially included in the Egyptian feminist agenda.

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Sahrawis. Public unveiling at the start of the ESU served as a performative assertion of our freedom from patriarchal subjugation.

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Besides campaigning for the right to vote,

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the RFU embarked on educational programs for women and established French and Arabic language magazines like the Gypsy Inn and Miserere.

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But you are not alone in this. In 1944, another renowned feminist, Doria Shafik.

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Established the French language magazine La Femme Val, followed by the Arabic Beantown Neil in 1945.

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In the wake of the revolution and the free officers.

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Radical openness to gender equality.

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Shafiq registered Beantown male party to press for women's right to vote and to run for political office.

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Indeed, the vigour and diversity of the Egyptian feminist movement was such that the secular elite segments led by Shafiq al-Shara,

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we were challenged by Zainab Al-Ghazali, Muslim Women's Association, on matters related to veiling and women's political participation.

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But they were unified in their rejection of the position of women on the personal status law.

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And as we'll see shortly, Siri was fully attuned to and deeply harboured the concerns of Egyptian feminists insofar

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as they focussed on women's rights in the context of the modern sovereign nation.

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But if the feminist movement gave Siri her political orientation and thematic focus,

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her involvement in the group of modern art provided her the requisite expressive language as a painter.

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Formed in 1948 by young artists associated with the Institute of Pedagogy in Cairo.

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The group followed on the heels of successive artist groups that had since the 1920s,

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participated in the discourse of what it meant to be modern Egyptian in a world of conflicting and complementary political,

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cultural and artistic ideologies.

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One such group is the Society of Art and Liberty, an interdisciplinary group founded in 1938 and led by the writer George,

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her name and the artists Kamal, Tony, Sunny and Ramses Eunan.

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The society identified with the International Surrealist Movement and protested the Nazi

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suppression of the European modernist avant garde publishing their manifesto in December 1938,

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titled Long Live Degenerate Art.

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Not only that, they rejected all forms of colonialism as well as nationalist art because of its tendency, as they claimed, to limit artistic freedom.

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A son, Badawi has noted. The society also denounced what they perceived as the imported academy system, endorsed by the propaganda seeking monarchy,

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and broke away from conservative bourgeois morality and celebrated art for art's sake.

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Yet for all its internationalist perspective and more specifically, what one might call the euro failure,

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some Ghareeb has also suggested that it is impossible to discountenance the group's

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participation in Egyptian social and political activism to its utmost ability.

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There was also the group of contemporary art led by the art teacher Hussein Yusef Amin,

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and which included such artists as Abdel Have the Alcazar or See shortly.

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Hamid, Nada and Yusef Kamel. Despite that, some of its members are associated with the older surrealists of art and liberty.

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They were less interested in the internationalist preoccupations of the latter,

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focusing instead on the role of artists in the social and political transformation of the Egyptian society.

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By identifying with the underclass and with full cultures in a highly stratified society,

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they called for a break with the elitism of the previous avant garde groups, particularly the surrealists.

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They are a brand of realism soon attracted official attention, such as when El Gonzales,

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who was detained in 1949 by the Kings King Ford's agents for his painting,

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he called the hunger for its primitivist depiction of impoverished and hungry Egyptian ordinary folk.

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Following the inexplicable loss of the offensive work.

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Gaza recreated it in 1951, giving it a less accusatory, though no less disturbing title for quiet.

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Like the other members of the Group of Contemporary Art, Garza identified with the free officers, nationalistic rhetoric and revolutionary program.

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Though he still retains some of the surrealistic impulses that pulled him into the orbit of art and liberty.

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For its part, the Group of Modern Art formed in 1947 by former students of the art critic Yousef Al Afifi at the Institute of Arts Education,

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including Gamal Serafini and Hamid Weiss,

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who differentiated themselves from other groups by developing a rather cacophony,

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yet persuasive modernist art that liberally borrowed from forensic Coptic and folk

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art mixed with various styles and far more strategies of the European avant garde.

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This stylistic eclecticism may have resulted in what Liliane Kaniuk was described as a non revolutionary Mannerist style,

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but it clearly was compelling pictorial argument for modern Egypt's multiple heritage.

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They are work as we saw with a wise and sad.

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Guinea was at once modernist and unabashedly nationalistic, which made it particularly responsive to the imperatives of a revolutionary period.

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Thus, Gatsby, a series of early 1950s paintings, reflect group's version of Egyptian modernism.

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Yet. Her images of the woman as activist.

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Mother, daughter, wife. True to her feminist consciousness, thick to the precarious conditions of women during the revolutionary years.

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Two paintings. First, Umrah Tiba from 1952.

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And two wives we'll see shortly are exemplary.

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The first shows an older woman holding the hand of a younger woman, possibly her granddaughter,

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in a gesture that conveys maternal intimacy and protection and filial confidence.

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With. They are tense polls and inscrutable facial expression.

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The women assert their mutual solidarity and strength made all the more palpable by the older woman's powerful hands and strong facial features.

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The Egyptian woman in series telling stands confidently with each other,

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crossed generationally ready to confront the challenges of the nation in time of radical change.

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On the other hand, two wives address polygamy.

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That most vexed subject for Egyptians, secular feminists.

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It points to the determinate role. Having a male child plays in the lives of coal wives.

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In this case, the second younger wife sitting on a rug and suckling a male child,

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commands the attention of a proud husband whose left hand firmly clasps her shoulder.

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The first wife, mother of three daughters, now sidelined, is hunched over, grief stricken along with her children.

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One only needs to compare the glowing skin and flowery dress of the suckling mother to the depressed shades of the grieving woman.

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To see, as the feminists argued, the connection between a woman's ability to bear male children and her status in a polygamous family.

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Even so. The Second Wave's expression of boredom laced with anxiety might reflect the precarity of

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our low class life implied by the uninvited dish and wilted vegetables set before her,

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but also the likelihood of our fall from favour the moment her husband marries another younger wife.

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Without doubt,

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this is one of Syria's most direct confrontation of a culture that measures women's value by their fertility and the personal status law,

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which more or less guaranteed their expandability as wives or core wives in polygamous families.

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The work was forms a critique of the sexist system and a pressure campaign in

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support of the new regime because of its pledge to end such discriminatory laws.

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Two other paintings of the period Song of Revolution from 1952, in which two Ben women perform at the piano and the teacher.

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Showing a young instructor with all girls class are among Syria's most direct expression of support for the revolution from her feminist perspective.

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Oh, let me put it this way. In these works, Siri not only declares the firm support of Egyptian women for the revolution,

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she highlights their role as revolutionary teachers and as cool guardians of the new progressive socialist state.

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Even so, they testify to perhaps the dilemma of an artist still negotiating artistic and political allegiances between the fiercely modern

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Parisian chic women revolutionary musicians rendered in a style mildly reminiscent of the rebellious German expressionists.

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And the tame social realist sentimentalism of the teacher.

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This stylistic eclecticism, though a hallmark of the group of modern art,

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might in fact reflect not just the artist's ambivalent response to the struggle between the independent feminism of Qaradawi and Shafiq and others,

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and the scripted state version in the early years of NASA's rule,

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but also anxious search for appropriate modes of address for a quickly changing post-revolutionary Egypt.

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What is clear is that by the mid 1950s, the regime's record had become quite controversial, particularly in its affairs with women.

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In 1956, for instance, the law granting women the right to vote finally passed.

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To the delight of the suffragists.

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Yet the government systematically liquidated most of the established feminist movements like the ESU,

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replacing them with state controlled associations.

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Doria Shafiq was placed under house arrest and banned from speaking in public following her second hunger strike in 1957.

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While the painter in a platoon was jailed for her work as a prominent communist and feminist activist, not because of a painting.

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And despite that, more women joined the civil service and participated in party politics as never before.

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The personal status law remained largely intact.

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As if to reflect these socio political tensions of major gains and stifling losses for the women's rights movement and the citizenry.

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Series Painting style changed drastically.

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The earlier boat lines, distinct forms and shapes of colours soon gave way to encrusted,

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frenetic paint application, and the dutifully drawn figures and environments were replaced by.

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Crudely rendered and more resolutely expressive surfaces.

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In many of these later paintings, emphasis on bold, graphically painted eyes might insinuate Egypt's Coptic Christian heritage.

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Yet it is hard to miss the nervous gaze of figures deceived by a world set to swell by changing forces beyond their control.

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They are moored, floating alongside scrawny birds and cats, barely holding onto flimsy threads against flat and unbounded areas of colour.

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Or they are fleeing from setting and unknown terrors, as did many opponents and critics of the nursery.

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By the end of the decade, Nassau was at the height of his powers within Egypt and internationally.

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Although he suffered a major political setback when he.

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His signal political experiment that is the 1958 unification of Egypt and Syria.

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As the United Arab Republic collapsed in 1961, the Nasser right movement dominated North Africa and the Middle Eastern region,

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no small thanks to his use of radio broadcasts to spread his pan-Arab ideology.

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Even so serious work, including prison fight of 1959 and Matter of 1961,

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addressed the widespread suppression of dissent by the triumphant head of state.

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Suspended in prisons. Dark Pictorial Space.

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Six hastily drawn, lightly painted, disembodied heads outlined by the rough white glazed canvas.

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The bright light behind them. Framing them in trembling halos.

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Their eyes, still reminiscent of the Coptic style are large the pupils smaller with the fact that the faces apps cared.

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What is more at the top of the picture is a square shaped, barred window behind which is a golden yellow sun.

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One of the faces has teardrops.

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While the black face to the bottom left has dabs of red paint on her head, suggested that she might be a victim of punitive violence.

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This picture of incarcerated women.

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Of diverse races may allude to the fact that the opposition to NASA's government consisted of women and men of different ideological,

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religious and political convictions. Quite tellingly, however, Siri placed her signature as substitute for one of the prisoners eyed,

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tagged as if to personalise the experience of NASA's carceral state and to identify

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with other women that might have been Sisters of the Revolution in the early 1960s,

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but had become enemies of the right state.

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The matter, on the other hand, shows an emaciated man clutching at a tree branch,

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his left palm open, as if in surrender or is an assertion of innocence.

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But with a gaze at once accusatory and defiant of the victim, temporarily fends off his inexorable martyrdom by hanging on to light.

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Unwilling to plunge into the threatening darkness.

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Like prison. The matter, too, might be biographical, as it is likely a portrait of our daily series husband,

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who was jailed for three months for his political affiliations.

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In any case, these two paintings must be seen as serious act of solidarity with victims of official

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suppression that included people in a circle such as India Flatworm that I mentioned earlier,

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whose husband died in 1957, apparently from head injuries sustained while in prison.

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And, of course, a platoon herself, as mentioned earlier, was jailed in 1959,

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an experience that she recorded in paintings that more or less defined her artistic practice.

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They are also a testament to the harsh political manoeuvres of a regime intent on suppressing dissent.

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But if the canal the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1954 marked NASA's first triumphal act.

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The US one high dam. That great icon of technological mastery over mighty nature, constructed between 1960 and 1970,

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dramatically raised Egypt's energy production and became the focal point of its industrialisation program and Cold War politics.

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Progress on the construction celebrated by many contemporary artists and key changes in the civil service, social services,

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educational sector and the economy became an alibi for suppressing Nasser's political and ideological opposition.

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Many among the original supporters of the revolution.

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What is clear is that this decade confirmed Nasser as the single most important figure in the Arab world.

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A dominant force in the nascent organisation of African unity.

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And a powerful voice in the newly formed Non-Aligned Movement.

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Indeed, El Garza's enigmatic painting piece of 1965 might be the most powerful artistic statement to the glory of Nasser and his socialist state.

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While it might take an entire lecture to decode the complex signification and surplus imagery,

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characters and symbols deployed by the artist in this work,

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it should suffice to note that it is an unabashed paean to Nasser as a leader,

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to Egypt, as a powerful, ancient and modern nation, and to Cairo as a world capital.

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Some scholars have suggested Rafael's school of offence as a model for this work,

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especially with a crowd to the right that includes the artist at his easel,

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characters representing diverse professions and students at the chalkboard.

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But apart from the fantastical figures in the foreground, mysterious animated pageantry of people and animals to the left,

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and of course, the big winged monumental structure in the distance.

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It is the scene at the centre that reveals the work's subject matter.

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In this now beachside clearing framed by rows of national flags and witnessed by the festive and watchful crowd,

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is a historic gathering of global leaders.

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That is the second summit of the Non-Aligned Movement that took place in Cairo in 1964.

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It is at this same summit, the largest gathering of nations outside of the United Nations that the then Sri Lankan prime

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minister spoke about the imperative of world peace that was adopted as the summit's declaration,

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the other being total decolonisation.

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We know from all Gaza's preparatory sketches that he initially had a monumental figure standing on a stepped platform, his hands stretching out.

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And that in a subsequent sketch the figure is replaced by a winged crowd like

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abstract mass that ruled in the final work morph into a gleaming palatial structure.

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Here then, I believe, is Al Gore's surrealistic conflation of NASA's mighty presence with the Egyptian nation.

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In the context of the Non-Aligned Movement that served as the guarantor.

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And protect our global peace in the shadow of the Cold War.

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But if 1964 represents NASA's finest moment.

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That. And that is the year he hosted not just the Non-Aligned Movement, but the inaugural Arab League as well.

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Gaza's subject in peace might suggest.

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1967 ruptured his charisma.

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And political clout in Egypt and on the international scene.

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In the first week of June that year, Israel and three Arab states led by Egypt fought the Six-Day War,

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in which Israel humiliated its opponents in the battlefield, annexed Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.

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The crushing defeat resulted in the loss of faith by many Egyptians in the Nasserist Socialist ideology.

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Inaugurated in 1952. By the revolution. The shock of what Nassar euphemistically called max or setback spread through the Arab world.

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Days later, Nassar announced his resignation.

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Oh, well, he only changed his mind the next day, but only after mass demonstrations in Egypt and across the Arab world.

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Built up in his support. Back in on the shaky driving seat.

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This time, he added to his portfolio the role of Prime Minister and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces,

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reorganised the military hierarchy, made cosmetic changes toward political liberalisation in response to protests by workers and students.

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By the next Arab summit in Khartoum that November, it was clear.

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To the gathered heads of states that NASA's time at the helm was over,

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prompting his Saudi rivals and their Western backers to ramp up their anti-socialist schemes in the region in order to undermine Nasser.

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Indeed. The glorious Nasser rights piece, celebrated only two years earlier by Alcazar, was quashed by the Six-Day War, leaving in its wake,

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despair and grief, especially among the intellectual and political elite that had invested much in post-revolutionary Egyptian nationalism.

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In response to this moment. Hamid Weiss, an ardent Nasser.

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Right. Painted arguably his most memorable work, and that is the enigmatic garden of life rendered in the social,

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really style the artist developed early in his career.

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Inspired especially by the work of the Mexican painters Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros,

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the pictorial montage of diverse landscapes and inchoate clusters of people

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renders the painting's subject matter mute or rather close to easy reading.

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Framing the background to the left are a verdant lawn desert landscape and a cake version of the Swan Dam housing the cerulean waters of the Nile.

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To the right. It built up Oasis, an active factory and group of workers.

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But who is this dark skinned, mustachioed, powerfully built militant.

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With his cropped hair wrapped in a bandana. He's clearly not a regular soldier.

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Yet. He gestures his massive right hand as if to shield and protect the motley group that includes a scientist in his lab.

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Smooching lovers, a wedded couple is seated.

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Mother nursing her baby girl in blue, drawing on a board.

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A farmer gently torching a full. We have here a decidedly more diverse spectrum of people in an atmosphere hovering between gloom and solemnity than

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we saw in the electrified and rowdy scene of the artists Nasser and the nationalisation of the Canal of 1957.

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But who indeed is the guardian of the Post's Max Life?

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This anonymous militant who appears capable of and ready to guard the citizenry and the land of Egypt from known and unknown terrors.

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It seems to me that this work is the meditative expression of an artist who,

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in the face of the unexpected defeat of NASA's military and political machine in the Six Day war harbours the devastating,

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yet utterly evident but cautiously hopeful idea that the future of Egypt will no longer depend on the singularity of NASA's power and charisma,

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but on the collective spirit of the people and the nation personified by the hulking, anonymous militant.

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I might even suggest that this work is a way, in a way, echoes.

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The sentiment in the inn is tons of oom kalthoum national anthem that I referred to earlier in which the lasting protection of Egypt is attributed.

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Not to some king or big man, but to the people themselves.

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Guys we are series response to the Nassar through to her more sceptical view of NASA's politics was darker and more ominous.

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Her painting style the equivalent of a dirge.

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Her most important work that year is grief, a grim painting featuring a pedestal, self-portrait with dishevelled hair and mournful expression.

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She's nearly absorbed by the sombre and apocalyptic landscape of a support, cruel, airless structure behind which is a red blood setting.

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Sun in its front blows a spectral pyramidal form.

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If the Red Sun of NASA's socialist state had been in assent since 1952.

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The war forced it to premature setting. Spreading such darkness across the land that not even the nostalgic glow of Pharaonic glories could dispel.

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While she painted Griff,

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Siri also began to develop a new series of paintings in which she reflected on the shattering of the national psyche after the war.

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The abstracted houses that frequently appeared in her late 1950s paintings became animated metaphors for contemporary Egypt in disintegrated houses,

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for instance, a vertical, mostly white zone of relative silence split to areas of dominating reds and blacks.

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Each part is fragmented into smaller, rectangular shapes reminiscent of the dense geometric architecture of urban Cairo.

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The Shatter forms, in a way, suggests a zone of violent devastation,

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perhaps an epicentre of massive bombing that has reduced an entire neighbourhood to rubble.

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Yet at the top left corner is a face,

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the outline of which merges with the edges of the broken architectonic shapes of colour, the oneness of body and structure.

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Land and mission, suggested here, must be seen as a serious way of connecting this traffic of the landscape with

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psychological desolation of Egypt and its people resulting from the war.

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In subsequent work from the series faces an evanescent human figures began to appear.

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ENMESHED in a web of dense, horizontal and vertical strokes and masked shapes as if to reinforce the inseparable ability of the land,

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the houses and the people of Egypt locked in a political and existential muck at a time of great despair.

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In his last years, Nasser endeavoured to capture his pre 1967 magic by attempting to stitch together

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the increasingly crumbling regional power network through the Arab League.

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His position made all the more tenuous by weakening Soviet support.

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In October one, 1970, he convened an emergency Arab League summit to stave off crises between two regional parties he no longer had sway over.

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Hours later. He died of a heart attack.

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At 52. Sending the entire mission into a state of unexpected mourning.

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His funeral, attended by more than a million people, brought the Nasarawa State and Iraq to an end.

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A year later, Gatsby's theory painted silent house.

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An all over canvas of bounded geometric patches of colour and decorative motifs,

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all scrambled and in part organised by strong curvilinear and perpendicular lines.

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The dense looseness of the composition.

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The shutting door at the bottom. And the stylised figure with her hand covering her mouth.

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All signify, I think. Estate of stifling and stultifying spaces.

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Thank you.