Emerging from Huda Lutfi’s research for an art installation at the hospital of Mamluk Sultan Qalawun (Cairo) is an ongoing interest in healing. This series of collages representing imaginary healing devices are intended to captivate our attention and to promote a non-verbal, therapeutic effect. The artist and the viewer are both healed through the practice of creation and interaction with the work. In part, inspired by the extraordinary mechanical designs for a hundred automata by 12th-century Arab engineer, Ismaʿil al-Jazari, the collages endeavor to enter zones of unvisited memories by exploring the relaxing, non rationalist act of play that takes our subjective imagination out of ordinary life, and bringing emotional relief. Lutfi’s restorative eye and hand brings a playful process of experimentation and surprise to discarded and devalued, cut-outs reassembled as collages, just as al-Jazari created entertaining automata to demonstrate complex, mechanical principles.
The lines of text in the collages are meant to have presence, but not to be read. As Lutfi explains, “The textual formulas in this series of works are rendered intentionally indecipherable, hinting to a form of self-censorship, entangled in a context of everyday constraints. I opted to work with the medium of collage as opposed to painting, so as to enhance the sculptural nature of the healing devices. The subtle and layered color schemes of the works invoke traces like palimpsests, the rustic silver and gold backgrounds bringing to mind flashes of insight and an almost forgotten mode of knowledge that may inspire the present.”
