Huda Lutfi: Unraveling

As a cultural connoisseur of Cairo, Lutfi has taken her home city by storm; she has excavated its popular markets, repurposed its found objects, collaborated with its artisans, and tutored refugee and homeless children, thereby endowing the cityscape itself with new life and signification while offering a complex reading of the politics of urban labor and economies. Lutfi’s work is infused with a spiritual depth that is expressed in her use of Sufi poetry and texts, incorporation of magical signs, script, and figures that are accentuated through the meditative power of repetition. Just as Lutfi’s work is marked by spontaneity, playfulness, and simplicity, it simultaneously invokes an inward psychological experience, as well as spiritual stillness and steadfastness.

 

Lutfi’s immersion in the historical has fashioned the layered and archival dimension of her art practice across a wide range of media: collage, installations, assemblages, painting, photo-montage, and video. These carefully excavated and reassembled fragments of history and memory are infused with the political context in which she works, rendering them at once disruptive, sarcastic, and empowering. The personal context in which Lutfi produces her art is of equal relevance to understanding the various aspects of her work: moments of pain – both physical and emotional – moments of doubt and loss of direction, moments of euphoria and liberation, moments of reflection and existential angst – all are mirrored in the artworks themselves.

In contrast, Lutfi’s Healing Devices comprises works that take us back to her more playful mode, as well as her practice of bricolage through a series that mimics the miniature format. Instead of the more familiar figurative representations, Lutfi works with abstract formations suggesting palimpsest constructions that evoke diverse artistic traditions. She engages with her discarded paintings in a hypnotic process of mutilation and reassembly, restoring the shredded pieces into a balanced and whole composition, like a puzzle. Composed of small handmade paper works, the series is inspired by The Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, a book by 12^th-century Arab engineer and polymath Ismail al-Jazari. Lutfi came across the book while doing research on medical manuscripts for an installation she worked on at the hospital of the Mamluk Sultan Qalawun in 2019. Al-Jazari’s work provides a wealth of instructions for art, design, manufacture, and assembly of mechanical devices, all meant to contribute to a more comfortable and productive daily life. Lutfi takes al-Jazari’s mechanical ideas a step further, creating devices and magical textual formulas, which negotiate notions of healing and reparation. The practice of making these devices initiates a process of healing in the face of instability and agitation. Art becomes a way to befriend the negative. Through a deliberate process of destruction and re-creation, Lutfi’s work becomes a reincarnation of itself: she gifts the fragments of discarded paintings an afterlife with fresh signification and organic value.

In Our Black Thread, Lutfi moves to minimalist works dictated by the domestic space she is obliged to inhabit. Here, the constraints of the domestic release the creative force in the meanderings of the mind, as Lutfi’s hand threads webs of memory on discarded fabric teabags and car filters found in the streets of her neighborhood. Lutfi’s threading is elevated to a meditative act where the hand works effortlessly to quieten the mind. But, as the title of the series suggests, the act of threading itself references and celebrates a collective memory and history of women who labor with thread, as seamstresses like her mother, as well as embroiderers and weavers. Like the ancient Egyptian goddess Neith who is associated with the spider as the spinner and weaver of fate, Lutfi threads and unravels a personal and collective memory and history.