YOUSSEF NABIL (EGYPTIAN, B. 1972)

'She represented exactly what I wanted to say. She was the link between West and East in her music and in herself as a person, and I liked that. I felt something personal in her, and I related to it'.
(The artist quoted, October 2009).
In his delicate photographs, the Egyptian artist Youssef Nabil depicts seductive and sensuous characters in almost theatrical poses. The women in his photographs evoke the Middle Eastern and North African clichés of beauty, once discovered in the Orientalist paintings of the nineteenth century, although their depictions often reveal subtle irony. His observation of life is inspired by cinematographic practices and many of his photographic works, enhanced by his distinctive technique of hand-colouring, are reminiscent of film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema and become somehow nostalgic of a better past.
In the present work Natacha Atlas, Saqqarah, 2000, Nabil depicts the famous singer seductively gazing out behind the veil of traditional Egyptian costume. The reference to Saqqarah, the famous burial site of the ancient Egyptians, plays on the revelation that the name Saqqarah is in fact not derived from the ancient Egyptian funerary god Sokar, but from the Beni Saqqar who are a local Berber tribe.