Cover Art Concept

The Egyptian Laila El Sadda is part of the Art Trio, a collective of women artists that also includes al-Assmaa Taki Deen and Mariam Mahdy. El Sadda’s art reflects her practice, showing the intimacy of women’s collectives and sociability. Her paintings depict groups of women with large, Horus-like (or khamsa/ hand of Fatima–like) eyes, looking out of the frame with clear, serene gazes. As a focal point, the eyes center the paintings as they seem to center the figures.

A series of El Sadda’s recent works show women pressed close together, their arms wrapped protectively around one another in friendship and solidarity. On a Facebook page where she shows much of her work, El Sadda (2019b) writes, “When women support each other, incredible things happen.” In Cairo West Magazine she reflects on the importance of social media for “connecting people” through her art and “communicat[ing] the message” (El Sadda 2019a). Other paintings show women gathered around a commensal meal, a mother wrapping her arms around children, two women facing each other, communing.

The painting featured on this issue’s cover portrays four women—an arrangement that El Sadda says she never tires of reproducing, which evokes an Egyptian reconfiguration of Eugène Delacroix’s (four) Women of Algiers in Their Apartment in ways suggested by Assia Djebar. Djebar critiqued Delacroix’s objectification of Algerian women shown in the intimacy of their home, but El Sadda shows self-possessed Egyptian women in control of their own representation, staring out at the viewer, not objects but their own subjects. El Sadda shows what Djebar calls “sister-companions”— sister-companions not to men but to each other. “We must look for a restoration of the conversation between women,” Djebar (1992: 149–50) writes. But in El Sadda’s paintings those conversations seem never to have been severed.

El Sadda uses “scraps from old notebooks, newspapers and magazines” on the women’s faces (email to JMEWS editors, March 26, 2020), along with Arabic letters written across their fronts, with textiles and books in a stack behind them. These images speak to multiple forms of expression through different media, scripts, and languages. El Sadda’s degree in architectural engineering and her work in architecture and interior design inform how she structures these paintings, mixing shapes, textures, patterns, and bright colors for a vivid visual effect. In other recent works by El Sadda, some of them featured in the 2020 Cairo exhibit Artists’ Spring to benefit street children, women’s faces share, in a trompe l’oeil, eyes that look out at the viewer.