Nermine Hammam

Last updated
Nermine Hammam
Born1967

Nermine Hammam (born 1967) is an Egyptian artist who lives and works in Cairo and London. [1]

She was born in Cairo [1] and later moved to England and then the United States in 1985. [2] She received a BFA in film-making from the Tisch School of the Arts in New York City. She worked in film with Simon & Goodman and then with Egyptian director Youssef Chahine. [3] She was a production assistant on the 1992 Spike Lee film Malcolm X . [2] Hammam subsequently worked as a graphic designer before moving on to visual arts and photography. [3]

As a female photographer, Hammam said she "entered this traditionally male-dominated space, camera in hand, inverting conventional power relationships to ‘shoot’ the soldiers. Their response to my presence, as a woman, in their midst, has become part of the ‘facts’ documented in these images.” [4]

Hammam is known for the distinctive technique with which she reworks photography, addressing the influence of mass media and market stylization. [5] Her layered, digitally manipulated works explore the subjective nature of reality. [4] As the founder and creative director of Equinox Graphics, Hammam is also known for introducing art into the public space through innovative design and branding. She is behind some of Egypt’s most familiar brands, including Cilantro Café, Diwan Bookstores and the Deyafa group of restaurants and bars. [5]

Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in Egypt, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the United States, Kuwait and Singapore. Hammam's work is included in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the Parco Horcynus Orca in Italy. [3]

Over the past decade, her work has been shown in more than seventy-five international exhibitions with over 7 exhibitions in the UK alone. Her work has been featured in over 50 publications and written about in the magazines such as Newsweek (USA), the Financial Times (UK), and The Times (UK). [6]

In her London exhibition "Cairo Year One", Hammam used the style of traditional Japanese painting to present violent scenes from the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. [7] "Cairo Year One" featured ten photographs from "Upekkha" (2011), the first part of the “Cairo Year One” series, and two photographs from later works in the series, “Unfolding” (2012). Hammam juxtaposed images of soldiers in Tahrir Square during the uprising with peaceful scenes from her personal collection of postcards. [4] “This work is about youth, universal youth, and the harshness and inhumanity of sending our children to war”, said Hammam. Inspired by propaganda posters from the 1940s and ’50s depicting strong figures in idealized settings, Hammam said, “the backgrounds emphasize the discordant presence of armed men among civilians in Tahrir: men of war in Paradise.” [4]

Hammam received a 2011 Freedom to Create award (first prize); a 2011 Worldwide Photography Gala Award (first prize); a 2012 Julia Margaret Cameron Award (honorable mention); a 2010 Jacob Riis Award (runner-up); and was a 2010 Invisible World Portfolio Selection finalist (honorable mention). [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Miller</span> American photographer and photojournalist (1907–1977)

Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose, was an American photographer and photojournalist. She was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became a fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she was a war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.

Uta Barth is a contemporary German-American photographer whose work addresses themes such as perception, optical illusion and non-place. Her early work emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, "inverting the notion of background and foreground" in photography and bringing awareness to a viewer's attention to visual information with in the photographic frame. Her work is as much about vision and perception as it is about the failure to see, the faith humans place in the mechanics of perception, and the precarious nature of perceptual habits. Barth's says this about her art practice: “The question for me always is how can I make you aware of your own looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at." She has been honored with two National Endowments of the Arts fellowships, was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004‑05, and was a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Barth lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eve Arnold</span> American photojournalist (1912–2012)

Eve Arnold, OBE (honorary), FRPS (honorary) was an American photojournalist, long-resident in the UK. She joined Magnum Photos agency in 1951, and became a full member in 1957. She was the first woman to join the agency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graciela Iturbide</span> Mexican photographer (born 1942)

Graciela Iturbide is a Mexican photographer. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is included in many major museum collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The J. Paul Getty Museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Candida Höfer</span> German photographer (born 1944)

Candida Höfer is a German photographer. She is a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like other Becher students, Höfer's work is known for technical perfection and a strictly conceptual approach. From 1997 to 2000, she taught as professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. Höfer is the recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Contribution to Photography award, as part of the Sony World Photography awards. She is based in Cologne.

Ingrid Pollard is a British artist and photographer. Her work uses portraiture photography and traditional landscape imagery to explore social constructs such as Britishness or racial difference. Pollard is associated with Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers. She lives and works in London.

Berni Searle is an artist who works with photography, video, and film to produce lens-based installations that stage narratives connected to history, identity, memory, and place. Often politically and socially engaged, her work also draws on universal emotions associated with vulnerability, loss and beauty.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Boughton</span> American photographer (1866–1943)

Alice Boughton was an early 20th-century American photographer known for her photographs of many literary and theatrical figures of her time. She was a Fellow of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession, a circle of photographers whose artistic efforts succeeded in raising photography to a fine art form.

Lara Baladi is an acclaimed Egyptian-Lebanese photographer, archivist and multimedia artist. She was educated in Paris and London and currently lives in Cairo. Baladi exhibits and publishes worldwide. Her body of work encompasses photography, video, visual montages/collages, installations, architectural constructions, tapestries, sculptures and even perfume. Much of her work reflects her "concerns with Egypt's extremely alarming sociopolitical context."

Vera Lutter is a German artist based in New York City. She works with several forms of digital media, including photography, projections, and video-sound installations. Through a multitude of processes, Lutter's oeuvre focuses on light and its ability to articulate the passing time and movement within a tangible image.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maud Sulter</span> Scottish photographer and writer (1960–2008)

Maud Sulter was a Scottish contemporary fine artist, photographer, writer, educator, feminist, cultural historian, and curator of Ghanaian heritage. She began her career as a writer and poet, becoming a visual artist not long afterwards. By the end of 1985 she had shown her artwork in three exhibitions and her first collection of poetry had been published. Sulter was known for her collaborations with other Black feminist scholars and activists, capturing the lives of Black people in Europe. She was a champion of the African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and was fascinated by the Haitian-born French performer Jeanne Duval.

Susan Hefuna is a German-Egyptian visual artist. She works in a variety of media, including drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, video and performance. She lives and works between Cairo, Egypt and Germany.

Ala Younis is a research-based artist and curator, based in Amman. Younis initiates journeys in archives and narratives, and reinterprets collective experiences that have collapsed into personal ones. Through research, she builds collections of objects, images, information, narratives, and notes on why/how people tell their stories. Her practice is based on found material, and on creating materials when they cannot be found or when they do not exist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrea Hamilton</span> Peruvian artist

Andrea Jarvis Hamilton is a conceptual artist and fine-art photographer best known for her extensive series of photographic images of the ocean, natural phenomena and the Kelvin scale. Her work encompasses the long term, systematic collection of subjects within a strict conceptual framework, creating expansive archives. These are retrospectively organised according to common visual characteristics into series which highlight certain themes: the nature of time and memory, climate change, colour theory and being. Her work also encompasses still life, long exposure, landscape and portraiture, street photography and landscape.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iman Issa</span> Egyptian multi-disciplinary artist (born 1979)

Iman Issa is an Egyptian multi-disciplinary artist whose work looks at the power of display in relation to academic and cultural institutions at large.

Jessica Eaton is a Canadian photographer living in Montreal, Quebec.

Laura El-Tantawy is a British-Egyptian photographer based in London and Cairo. She works as a freelance news photographer and on personal projects.

Sabah Naim is a contemporary Egyptian multimedia artist. Her work focuses on documenting people and scenes in Cairo, Egypt, and incorporates street photography, painting, collage, embroidery, and video art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gabriel Lekegian</span> Armenian photographer in Ottoman Egypt (1853–1920)

Gabriel Lekegian, also known as G. Lékégian, was an Armenian painter and photographer, active in Constantinople and Cairo from the 1880s to the 1920s. Little is known about his life, but he left an important body of work under the name of his studio ‘Photographie Artistique G. Lekegian & Cie’. With a large number of now historical photographs of Ottoman Egypt, he documented the country at the turn of the 19th century. Among other collections, his photographs are held in the New York Public Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Maha Maamoun, is an Egyptian award-winning visual artist and curator based in Cairo. She is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC), an independent non-profit space for art and culture founded in Cairo in 2004. She also co-founded the independent publishing platform called Kayfa-ta in 2013. She was awarded the Jury Prize for her film Domestic Tourism II at Sharjah Biennal 9 (2009). Maamoun is a fellow of the Academy of the Arts of the World.

References

  1. 1 2 de la Fuente, Alejandro (2015). Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela 1918-2013: Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora. p. 181. ISBN   978-0253018540.
  2. 1 2 "Nermine Hammam" (in French). Institut des Cultures d’Islam. 16 December 2014.
  3. 1 2 3 ""Let's play": Egyptian artist Nermine Hammam on the credibility of images". Art Radar. March 27, 2015.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "She Who Tells a Story: Nermine Hammam | Broad Strokes Blog". NMWA. 2016-06-07. Retrieved 2021-05-06.
  5. 1 2 "Nermine Hammam". Framer Framed. Retrieved 2021-05-06.
  6. 1 2 "Nermine Hammam". Nermine Hammam. Retrieved 2021-05-06.
  7. "Nermine Hammam: Cairo in Layers". Al-Akhbar. August 16, 2012. Archived from the original on July 24, 2017. Retrieved May 9, 2016.