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  • From the Editor
  • Chika Okeke-Agulu

Last year we lost two friends and colleagues, Amal Kenawy (1974–2012) and Colin Richards (1954–2012), two leading figures in the field of contemporary African art. This tribute is offered in their memory.

Born in Cairo, Egypt, Kenawy was a terrific artist, an incredible human being, and a leading voice in the thriving Cairo art scene. At the beginning of her career in the late 1990s, she collaborated with her brother, the artist Abdel Ghany Kenawy (b. 1969), creating multimedia work informed by her training in film and fashion design at the Fashion Institute, Cairo. Her work as a solo artist increasingly captured the simmering individual and collective anxieties in Egypt and anticipated the 2011 revolt at Tahrir Square. Silence of the Sheep (2009), a performance piece presented by the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, exemplifies this. In that work, Kenawy, dressed in overalls, led a group of men (including Abdel Ghany and several hired day workers) crawling on all fours along the street. But the sight of humiliated Egyptian men led by a woman in a hyperpatriarchal society was too much for the public, and the performance’s indictment of a populace held in thrall by an oppressive regime was not lost on the audience. The performance ended in a melee; Kenawy and her collaborators were arrested but later released. The public response to Silence of the Sheep no doubt had much to do with its apparent attempt to rupture already tense and fraying boundaries of gender, patriotism, and the social imaginary—especially in an Egypt riven by religious anxieties and political oppression.

If Silence of the Sheep carried a frontal political charge, Kenawy’s other work tended to be more contemplative, metaphysical, and melancholic. In The Room (2004), Kenawy, in performance, mends and later incinerates a mounted bridal gown while in an adjacent video projection two hands in bridal gloves suture and attach a paper rose onto a still-beating heart. In her video animation You Will Be Killed (2006), set in a colonial-era military hospital, her body, stained in purple blood, goes through sequential, surreal encounters with changing environments, building plans, bloodsucking animals, corpses, cobwebs, and so on. The body, in these works, is at once a site of violence, desire, memory, and transcendence; it is a metaphysical, anxious, beautiful, violated object. All these works testified to her passion for life and total commitment to her art.

Yet many who knew Kenawy remember her quiet generosity. Nka editor Salah M. Hassan recalls her selfless commitment to teaching video art techniques and processes to young Sudanese women in Khartoum, during a 2008 workshop organized by Hassan through a grant from Cornell University. Though Kenawy’s life and career was cut painfully short, she authored work of such significance and profundity that it would be impossible to ignore it in any account of contemporary African art of the past decade.

Colin Richards was born in Cape Town and trained as an artist and art historian at various institutions, [End Page 4] including the University of South Africa, Goldsmith’s College of University of London, and the University of Witwatersrand, where he earned a PhD in art history in 1995. He began his career as a medical illustrator and later cofounded an art therapy service in Soweto. Both experiences left a lasting impact on his highly illusionistic drawings and prints, through which he investigated ideas about the role of images in the exercise and maintenance of regimes of institutional control and oppression and the counter-vailing forces of liberation, past and present.

But it is for his work as a critic, curator, and art historian that Richards earned a reputation as one of the most sophisticated thinkers in the field of contemporary African art. It is hard to measure his influence as a scholar just by the number of his full-length monographic publications; he authored a monograph on the art of Sandile Zulu and published several influential essays on South African art. Richards is exceptional for the sharp, meticulous manner in which he examined any subject on which he beamed his critical and scholarly searchlight. It is tempting to think that his incredibly...

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