Ala Younis, High Dam: Modern Pyramid - exhibition at VI PER gallery

The independent exhibition of artist Aly Younis, entitled The High Dam: A Modern Pyramid, is based on her long-term research into the politics and representation of the High Aswan Dam, built on the Nile near Aswan in Egypt in the 1960s. It was a project for state building and the modernization of newly independent Egypt under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The dam, often described as a "modern pyramid," became the centerpiece of Egypt's agricultural growth, industrialization, and subsequent social reforms, albeit at the cost of flooding the historic lands of Nubia. The Nubian populations in Egypt and Sudan faced mass resettlement, and the ancient heritage of Nubia was threatened with complete destruction. Not least, the dam became a "battlefield" of the political and economic interests of the Cold War period, including the arms agreement made between Egypt and Czechoslovakia in 1955, mediated by the Soviet Union. While the dam was designed by Soviet engineers, the West funded the relocation of many ancient temples, the most notable being the relocation of two rock temples at Abu Simbel, which was part of UNESCO's international campaign to save Nubian monuments.

The exhibition The High Dam: A Modern Pyramid returns to this history and related microhistorical stories through both new and existing works. The newly created piece Friend of Nubia (2020) in the main room features a model of the vessel Sadik en-Nuba (Friend of Nubia), which served as a floating base for five Czechoslovak expeditions in Nubia. This catamaran was built in the Holešovice shipyard from surplus military pontoons and was subsequently disassembled and transported to Egypt, where it was reassembled, just like the Nubian temples of its time. The model also experiments with the possibilities of assembly and reassembly. The catamaran was designed by ship captain Milan Hlinomaz and also draws from anecdotes in his book Voyage for Hieroglyphs (1967) in a series of elevations. The similarities between archaeological and military expeditions are unmistakable: the expeditions not only acquired the necessary materials and equipment from the Czechoslovak army, but the establishment of the Czechoslovak Institute of Egyptology at Charles University based in Prague and Cairo in 1958 was partly a consequence of the arms agreement from 1955.

The High Aswan Dam also became a space for the propaganda apparatuses of Egypt (known from 1958 to 1971 as the United Arab Republic, UAR) and the USSR, which controlled how the dam was depicted in films and literature, such as in the works of Youssef Chahine and Sun’Allah Ibrahim. Chahine's mobile and posters (2019) compare scenes from several versions of the film shot by Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, which was the first co-production of the UAR and the USSR to promote the construction of the dam. The mobile, inspired by the kinetic sculptures of Alexander Calder, is an abstraction of several different elements from each of the three film versions, suspended in the air and changing configuration according to the draft from the Soviet fan, representing the apparatus of propaganda and censorship controlling the processes of film production. Sun’Allah's model (2020) in the small gallery refers to the Egyptian Marxist writer and former political prisoner Sun’Allah Ibrahim and his literary works based on the writer's stay at the dam construction site.

The Button Box (2019) symbolizes the ceremony in 1964, during which Egyptian President Nasser and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev together pressed the button that diverted the Nile from its ancient riverbed into a canal, thus marking the start of the next phase of construction. While Youssef Chahine captured this event in film and even signaled Nasser and his international guests, on the occasion of Khrushchev’s visit, Sun’Allah Ibrahim was released from prison. The diversion of the Nile also marked the beginning of the rising water levels, which slowly but surely submerged Nubian villages and archaeological sites. The series of prints Mobility (2020) captures some of the subsequent movements of both entities, such as the relocated temples and construction materials, as well as people, including displaced Nubians and construction workers. The High Aswan Dam not only transformed Egyptian (and Sudanese) geography but undoubtedly also the entire Egyptian nation in its role as a catalyst for modernization and social reforms in the newly independent country, thus becoming a model for many other independent countries.

Ala Younis is an artist focused on artistic research based in Amman, Jordan. She originally studied architecture. Her practice also includes curating, filmmaking, editing, and publishing. Her projects address collective experiences that reflect into personal ones. She explores archives, their play with weak spots, and how their gaps and errors can manipulate our imagination. Her work has been presented in several solo international exhibitions, at the Istanbul and Gwangju biennials, at the New Museum Triennial, and her work Plan for Greater Baghdad (2015) premiered at the main exhibition of the 56th Venice Biennale. She is a co-founder of the publishing initiative Kayfa ta and a board member of Forum Expanded at the Berlinale and a member of the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne, Germany. More at https://alayounis.art.

Curator: Rado Ištok