Moataz Nasr

(b. 1961, Alexandria; lives and works in Cairo)

Merge and Emerge, 2011
3 videos, 6’ 25” each, looped
Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano | Beijing | Les Moulins | Habana

Three dervishes whirl, throwing out their arms and then pressing their hands to their chests. Their skirts open like flower buds, the figures move as if in zero gravity, approaching and almost touching each other. The sensation of fragile, elusive balance and the expectation of an imminent collision are in tune with the rebellious mood in Egypt during the Arab Spring. The dervish dance is an integral part of collective worship, in which adepts attempt to achieve ecstatic fusion with God. This mystical journey represents a constant mutual transition between “the hidden” and “the manifest,” the fundamental concepts of Islamic philosophy. In Seeing Through Clothes, the fashion historian Anne Hollander writes: “much ethnic dress or folk costume […] has the quality of […] reducing the [wearer] to a symbol-bearing abstraction.” In the work of Moataz Nasr, the ecstatic ritual is presented as a process of transforming higher abstract concepts into understandable phenomena of optics and geometry, in which clothing plays a key role. The Sufis are dressed in red, green, and blue: the basic colors of the RGB model, which optically add up to sacral white. The dancers are shown from above: their ritual uniform, unfolded in a single plane, forms a circle: a universal form capable of representing great impersonal forces, be it God, the orbital motion of the planets (gravity), or infinity.