Provocative Acts and
Censorial Revisions
The Many Antagonisms of Amal Kenawy’s
The Silence of Lambs
Dan Jakubowski
By the time I saw Amal Kenawy’s video The Silence
of Lambs in Queens, New York, at the MOMA
PS1 exhibition “Zero Tolerance” (Oktober 26,
2014–April 13, 2015), the work and the perfor-
mance it documented were already infamous
among the artists, art critics, and historians that
made up Cairo’s contemporary art community. In 2009, Kenawy
(1974–2012), an Egyptian artist who frequently worked in per-
formance and video, hired a band of day laborers to take part in
what Alfred Gell would have termed an “art-like situation” (Gell
1998:13). During the height of midday traffic in downtown Cairo,
the artist directed the workers to crawl on hands and knees
across the busy intersection of Champollion Road and Mahmoud
Bassiouny Street. In addition to Cairene pedestrians and drivers
who happened to be passing the scene at the time of the perfor-
Mance, The Silence of Lambs was also viewed and recorded by a
crowd of Egyptian and international arts professionals who had
come downtown for the event. While the initial reaction to the
act was stunned silence, soon a group of bystanders confronted
Kenawy and her hired performers, demanding to know why she
was humiliating these men and, by extension, Egypt itself before
an audience of international elites. The confrontation intensified
to the point of violence and eventually the police arrived, arrest-
ing Kenawy and a number of her collaborators.
I was not present for the performance, having left Egypt some
months before to return to the United States. But the fallout from
The Silence of Lambs reached me through numerous written
Dan Jakubowski received his PhD from University of Florida in 2016
after conducting over three years of field research in Cairo and Alexan-
dria. His dissertation recounted the history of video art in Egypt from
the early 1990s to the present day, exploring how Egyptian artists used
video to engage their nation’s relationship with modernity, globaliza-
tion, and late capitalism. His current work historicizes the role of the
biennial and other large-scale, international exhibition formats on the
development of artists and institutions in Africa and elsewhere in the
non-Western world. djakubow@gmail.com
24 | african arts WINTER 2017 VOL. 50, NEIN. 4
accounts and critical discussions published on the Internet. Von
the time I returned to Cairo to conduct field research for my dis-
sertation in 2012, the controversy resulting from the initial action
had settled into public consciousness as an unfortunate misfire
of artistic experimentation that missed its mark of institutional
critique and deeply offended the local population of downtown
Cairo. Jedoch, even if the work had firmly passed into mem-
ory, discussions surrounding the ethics of the piece still inspired
passionate response from both defenders and critics of Kenawy’s
intervention. That Kenawy had converted visual documentation
of the performance into a video work and presented it at the 2010
Cairo Biennale only exacerbated these retrospective accounts
and appraisals of The Silence of Lambs (Figs. 1–5). The research
that led to this article became part of this collective conversation
as I began to piece together firsthand accounts of the perfor-
mance and its eventual transformation into video. What follows
is an attempt, through a compilation of witness recollections
and an excavation of the performance’s initial critical response,
to historicize Kenawy’s work as both a performance and a video
arbeiten. Endlich, I explore the slippages and metamorphosis that The
Silence of Lambs underwent during its shift in artistic medium,
examining the strange and often problematic politics that inhere
in the re-presentation of performance documentation as art in
selbst. By engaging with an artwork that passes through tradi-
tional medium boundaries while also traveling between local
audiences, foreign exhibition settings, and the context of inter-
national biennials, I hope to provide a model that could prove
useful in analyzing similarly peripatetic African artworks that
navigate multiple mediums and presentation formats.
When Kenawy began producing solo work in the early 2000s,
she created ingenious combinations of video, Leistung,
and installation, enclosing the viewer in a multimedia ecology
of often-conflicting material sensualities. The Room, exhibited
In 2002 at the Townhouse Gallery, was her first solo work and
consisted of a video and a live performance. The video showed a
young bride in her wedding dress, ensconced in a white bathtub
where she sews textile ornaments into a beating heart. While the
video played behind her, projected onto a large screen, Kenawy
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1 Amal Kenawy, still from The Silence of Lambs
(2010); video work; 8:51 min
The performers cross Mahmoud Basiounny
Street in downtown Cairo as observers watch.
This image was captured shortly before Amal
Kenawy was engaged in argument by a group of
male cafe patrons.
mirrored the actions of the bride, sewing beads onto a real heart
of an unidentified animal. In her artist statement for the project,
Kenawy wrote, “When I searched within myself I began to per-
ceive my self as an independent existence that retains a set of laws
that rule the body as a physical being … Emotions inhabit this
human frame and make of it a vessel, a form, a liminal space that
lies between the interior and exterior” (Kenawy 2002).
With these early performances, Kenawy demonstrated a keen
interest in the interplay of bodies and environments and in how
bodies functions as sites of encounter and intimacy. Her 2007
installation work Non-STOP Conversation, exhibited at the
Eighth Sharjah Biennial, wrapped the decaying ruins of a dilap-
idated stone building with a new skin of soft, pink quilting (sehen
Huleileh 2007). The artist sewed the quilting onto the structure
herself, transforming the installation into a performance piece as
she continued to clean and maintain the disused historical site
through the course of the exhibition. Her care for the building,
and her bestowment of bodily sensuality to its skeletal remains,
touched on the same themes of embodied history, decay, Und
rebirth that permeate the rest of her work.
While Kenawy was familiar with the mechanics of perfor-
Mance, spatial intervention, and video work, it was not until late
in her career that she brought these practices into the unpredict-
able realm of the street. The artist began planning Silence as part
of a series of performances, all of which were intended to encour-
age the audience to directly participate in the realization of the
funktioniert. She had planned at least two other performances, inkl-
ing one in which she would walk through the streets of Cairo
alongside a donkey burdened with a sound system that would
blast the call to prayer to the surrounding neighborhoods.1 As
a result of the eventually contentious reception of Silence, diese
other projects were never realized, and Silence was the only time
Kenawy engaged directly with an audience outside the confines
of a gallery space.2
During the planning phase of the project, Kenawy’s preliminary
VOL. 50, NEIN. 4 WINTER 2017 afrikanische Kunst | 25
ideas for Silence came to the attention of Nikki Columbus, Die
Townhouse Gallery’s project manager and curator. At that time,
Columbus was planning an exhibition to be titled “Assume the
Position,” and she thought that Kenawy’s gestating project was a
perfect fit for the theme of the show. “Assume the Position,” which
showed at the gallery from December 13, 2009, bis Januar 17, 2010,
explored issues of spectatorship, distraction, and ideological con-
trol through the works of seven international artists. Columbus’s
idea for the exhibition’s title stemmed from the dual meaning
of “assuming the position” found throughout the show’s works,
both that of assuming the position of a spectator and the other,
more rebarbative implication of assuming a position of subservi-
ence under a dominant, policing power. In either scenario, to use
Columbus’s words, “You’re the person who is not in control.”3
Kenawy’s original idea for Silence was to direct a small group
of volunteer participants in a short performance in downtown
Cairo. The volunteers, undergraduates from the American
University in Cairo’s fine arts program, were to crawl on hands
and knees through a busy downtown intersection. The planned
Projekt, with its strange spectacle of urban distraction with the
potential to temporarily halt the disinterested flux of people and
cars of downtown, appealed to Columbus.
After a series of conversations between Kenawy, Columbus,
and William Wells, the director of the Townhouse, it was decided
that the gallery would commission Silence and offer logistical
support. Wells had reservations concerning the project, espe-
cially regarding whether the participants would understand and
knowledgeably consent to their role in the performance. Kenawy
assured him this would be the case, and preparations went for-
ward. The artist and Mido Sadek, the manager of Townhouse’s
technical staff, approached shopkeepers in the surrounding
neighborhood to notify them of the performance and receive
their approval. According to Wells, the neighborhood’s endorse-
ment of Kenawy’s performance came easily at this early juncture.4
Wells’s concern for the participants proved sensible as the
performance date of December 14, 2009, approached (Elwakil
2011). Through further preliminary meetings and discussion, Es
became clear that Kenawy had not notified her volunteers of the
exact nature of their impending performance. When the AUC
students finally discovered what they were being called upon to
do, they all backed out, leaving the artist without a cast to execute
2 Amal Kenawy, still from The Silence of Lambs
(2010); video work; 8:51 min
A closer view of performers crossing Mahmoud
Basiounny Street.
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26 | african arts WINTER 2017 VOL. 50, NEIN. 4
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3 Amal Kenawy, still from The Silence of Lambs
(2010); video work; 8:51 min
Amal Kenawy, standing mid-photograph and
wearing large sunglasses, directs her performers
as the crawl down the sidewalk of Champollion
Road.
her project.5 The performance and Columbus’s exhibition were
occurring at the same time as the 25th Alexandria Biennale as
well as an international curating workshop, organized by the
Tate Modern and held at Townhouse (Thompson 2012:175). As a
Ergebnis, there were cadres of foreign press, Kuratoren, and artists in
Egypt to cover and participate in those events. Word of Kenawy’s
imminent performance quickly spread among these visitors, Und
the artist continued to promote the project even as it seemed to
be hopelessly gridlocked. Kenawy raised the possibility of hiring
Egyptian day laborers from the streets of Cairo to perform in the
Projekt, though Wells quickly dismissed the idea. In his opinion,
the laborers would have no understanding of the performance
or their participation in it, and this lack of mutual comprehen-
sion between artist and cast could give rise to charges of Kenawy
exploiting of the workers. Due to the director’s concerns, the idea
was temporarily put to rest.6
By the morning of December 14, Silence was dead. Word had
gotten to Wells by phone that no one was available to perform and
that the project was canceled. “To be perfectly honest, I thought it
would never happen,” he told me.7 His concerns over the ethical
ramifications of hiring performers, and his fears of how Silence
would have been received by the surrounding neighborhood,
had never abated. The project’s demise came as an abeyance of
sorts, allowing time to work out the possible conceptual land-
mines lying dormant in Kenawy’s plan.
The reprieve proved short-lived, Jedoch. After arriving at the
Townhouse later in the afternoon, Wells received word that the
performance was back on, and it would begin in fifteen minutes a
short distance from the gallery at the intersection of Champollion
Road and Mahmoud Bassiouny Street. Wells and his staff locked
the doors of the gallery and ran down to the junction, which was
glutted with traffic since the city’s public schools had let out only
minutes before. They arrived to see Kenawy, dressed glamorously
with ostentatious wrap-around sunglasses, directing a proces-
sion of men and women as they crawled out of an apartment
VOL. 50, NEIN. 4 WINTER 2017 afrikanische Kunst | 27
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4 Amal Kenawy, still from The Silence of Lambs
(2010); video work; 8:51 min
This still is taken from late in the video. It shows
Amal Kenawy arguing fiercely with a group of
men who were incensed by her performance
and what they viewed as the humiliation of a
group of Egyptian men for the pleasure of foreign
onlookers.
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By the time the group had crossed the street … By that moment in
Zeit, if Amal had stopped the performance, we wouldn’t be hav-
ing this conversation today. She would have had the film, and it
would have been a different piece altogether. But she continued to
walk down the street. I was told beforehand that the performance
would only go for about a hundred meters down the street. So very
short. But it would never enter into the territory of the shops that
had been discussed months before. But as she led the group down
Champollion, more and more people showed up, more people tak-
ing pictures. One knew, and could easily anticipate, that there would
be a problem. Everyone was praying that it would stop before.9
The performance did not stop, Jedoch, and it soon encoun-
tered a public that was far less receptive. A group of men
approached Kenawy and her crawling entourage, accusing them
all of humiliating themselves and Egypt for the pleasure of a for-
eign audience (Feige. 4). As the invective from outside parties grew
more incensed, the artist engaged a few of the angry bystanders
in a heated debate. Their conversation was caught on camera,
building on their hands and knees (Figs. 1–2). Sarah Rifky, one of
the Townhouse’s curators, had agreed to take part in the perfor-
Mance, and she led the column of performers as the first out of
the doors. Behind her, a group of around fifteen people, meistens
day laborers whom Kenawy had hired earlier that day, inched
ponderously along. The cast was filled out by two children under
the age of ten.
Wells remembered this moment with sharp-edged clarity
when we discussed the performance in 2013:
The thing that struck me the most was when they very slowly
came out into the street, there wasn’t this cacophony [von] Klang
and abuse and everyone wanting to get these people off the street.
There was a huge curiosity. People in the buses being held up, Die
cars. Everybody came out. There was a crowd that gathered instan-
taneously. No one clearly understood what was going on, except
that people were crossing the street on their hands and knees. It was
amazing. It was a very unusual moment for a busy intersection in
Cairo, to have this silence.8
His description is similar to Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s for Artforum:
“It was a moment I will never forget. When Cairo stood still, Und
silence fell over the street” (Wilson-Goldie 2013). Both describe
the moment as one in which the natural and social laws that dic-
tated the inner movements of Cairo’s urban machine had been
suspended for a fleeting instant. The onlookers seemed deflated,
somehow, as if the strangeness of the scene had lulled them into
a complacent stance of awed observation.
The pocket of tranquility did not last for long, Jedoch, burst-
ing seconds later as the performers moved southward along
Champollion (Feige. 3). Wells described the project’s descent into
bitter conflict as a quickly unfolding crisis, a sense of impend-
ing calamity that was apparent to many of the performance’s
observers:
28 | african arts WINTER 2017 VOL. 50, NEIN. 4
and most of it can be viewed in the video work that emerged
from the performance. The confrontation intensified until the
hired day laborers entered the fray and demanded more money
in recompense for their humiliation. Wilson-Goldie described
some of the more alarming moments of the conflict: “The shout-
ing match grew into a jostling mob that followed the performers
as they turned down a sidestreet, still on their hands and knees.
One person called Kenawy a whore and another suggested the
whole thing was evidence of a cruel international plot to tarnish
the image of Egypt” (Wilson-Goldie 2011). The livid bystanders
5 Amal Kenawy, still from The Silence of Lambs
(2010); video work; 8:51 min
One of the onlookers furiously interrogates
Kenawy, asking how her performance could be
considered art.
did not identify Kenawy as Egyptian, instead labeling her as a
foreign interloper who had brought her friends to document the
degradation of Egyptian lower-class men (Feige. 5). This misappre-
hension only worsened matters, inflaming the perception that
the artist’s performance was a foreign-originating ruse.10 Punches
were thrown, and the artist Osama Dawod, who was present to
photograph the event, was struck and his glasses broken. Der
police soon arrived to break up the altercation. Those document-
ing Silence rushed back to Townhouse and secreted their cameras
away in the gallery’s offices to avoid police confiscation. Kenawy
and the workers were quickly arrested and brought to the near-
est police station, where arguments between her and the hired
participants continued through the night and into the follow-
ing day. They were all eventually released when the Townhouse
met the day laborers’ demands and paid them more for their
participation.11
In the weeks that followed the calamitous performance,
numerous discussions occurred in the Cairo fine arts commu-
nity revolving around Silence, its artistic merits, and its ethical
repercussions. Damals, Kenawy felt as if the Townhouse had
not supported her after the performance had fell apart, leaving
her to languish in the police station to argue with the officers and
her own performers. The workers, who had not been informed
of their role in the performance beforehand and had no way
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VOL. 50, NEIN. 4 WINTER 2017 afrikanische Kunst | 29
to understand its conceptual underpinnings, felt betrayed and
disgraced, humiliated by an upper-class artist and her foreign
friends. The shopkeepers along Champollion who originally
signed off on Kenawy’s project were also incensed at both the
artist and Townhouse, because they were not informed as to
the changes Silence underwent before its execution. Even those
who knew of the alterations were embittered by its outcome.
Sarah Rifky, who supported Silence through its planning and
performed in the event itself, insisted on a purge of all imagery
directly linking her to the event, a demand that went unheeded
by Kenawy when she produced the video work documenting the
Leistung.
Other debates percolated amongst those without direct con-
nection to Silence, including observers and those who had only
heard about the project afterwards. Ursula Lindsey, a freelance
arts and culture reporter who was present for most of the perfor-
Mance, condensed the nature and content of these discussions:
Almost every Egyptian artist I spoke to about it was negative in
their response. Erste, who was the audience for this piece? There’s a
sense this was done for foreigners, and not for an Egyptian public.
It puts Egyptians in a demeaning position for foreigners. Auch, sie
chose to pay menial workers to participate in the piece who weren’t
in the position to understand or explain why they were doing this.
If the piece is about Egyptians losing their dignity, or following
blindly, her own class assumption, that she can just pay lower-class
people to be in the piece that won’t understand and just be extras
for her, is actually part of the thing she’s critiquing.12
The critical literature that emerged as a result of the perfor-
mance mirrored Lindsey’s concerns, questioning the exploitation
of paid workers who were ignorant about the elaborate fine art
conceptual vocabulary necessary to justify and the understand
Silence as an artwork. Mai Elwakil wrote about the eventual
video rendition of Silence for Egypt Independent, interrogat-
ing the work’s purpose and Kenawy’s motivations: “The deep
engagement of the public—the fight—which Kenawy highlights
in the video piece supports her work’s argument. But a problem
remains: since the public’s reaction was predictable from the very
beginning, what, if anything, was Kenawy actually exposing?”
(Elwakil 2011). In her historical retrospective of both the perfor-
mance and the video written for Frieze Magazine, Wilson-Goldie
also emphasized the work’s obvious social message:
As a none-too-subtle commentary on poverty, powerlessness, Und
the ills of an authoritarian system, Silence of Lambs made even the
most sympathetic of spectators uncomfortable. But for many of
the people who witnessed Silence of Lambs or who heard about it
or found themselves involved in heated debates, die Performance
risked too much to say too little (Wilson-Goldie 2011).
Noch, as time passed following the initial uproar, critical atti-
tudes towards Silence changed, first subtly, then demonstrably
when the work was transformed into a video piece at the 2010
Cairo Biennale. Kenawy’s performance instigated a critical debate
concerning Egyptian self-representation and the foreign gaze.
While many of the mostly male crowd denouncing Silence on
Champollion emphasized the poor treatment of the laborers as
the cause of their outrage, they must have been aware that these
workers and millions more like them suffer similar inequities
on a daily basis throughout Egypt. The country is riddled with
30 | african arts WINTER 2017 VOL. 50, NEIN. 4
poverty and, with the defunding of many social programs under
Presidents Sadat and Mubarak, there remains scant evidence of
the economic safety net imperfectly realized under the Nasser
regime. Penniless Upper Egyptians travel to Cairo searching for
arbeiten, where they are often exploited and always underpaid for
their labor.
In light of this historical and socioeconomic context, the apo-
plectic reaction to Silence and its exploitation of poor laborers
rings hollow. Eher, the performance’s undeniably public visi-
bility, its assumed foreign audience, and its orchestration at the
hands of a courageous and undaunted woman all seem like more
likely targets of the male onlookers’ ire. As Kenawy told Elkawil,
“The public was offended by the Silence of the Sheep performance,
although it basically mirrors what people discuss on a daily basis”
(Elwakil 2011).13 The social realities critiqued by Silence were not
new or shocking to its immediate audience on Champollion.
The unabashed visibility of these realities afforded by Silence was
neu, Jedoch, and made more disconcerting by the presence of
foreign observers who saw and documented what was unveiled.
While one cannot see within the minds of those who protested
most vehemently during the performance, their repeated accu-
sations that Kenawy and the workers were humiliating Egypt in
front of a foreign audience indicate a certain sensitivity to aes-
thetic gestures that even hint at associating poverty and suffering
with any projection of national self-image.
These debates were rekindled in December 2010, when video
documentation of Silence debuted at the 12th International Cairo
Biennale as part of a relational installation work produced by
Kenawy for the event. The project’s transformation and reintro-
duction to public life came as a surprise to Wells and the other
Teilnehmer. In the project’s new iteration, an eight-minute video
consisting of performance documentation was projected on
a screen adjacent to an elaborately designed kiosk from which
Kenawy and her son served food to the Biennale’s patrons. Der
critical reception of Silence at the event was diametrically opposed
to the bitter public rancor inspired by the initial performance.
The installation won the Cairo Biennale’s Grand Prize while also
garnering the attention and the acclaim of the international press
and curators from numerous international institutions. In pub-
lic statements and meetings with curators, Kenawy situated the
performance and the later video installation as victories in the
war against a censorious and domineering patriarchal society in
Ägypten. While the work was certainly a pointed critique of Egypt’s
traditionally male-dominated society, the nation’s willful igno-
rance of its disenfranchised citizens, and the Mubarak regime’s
longstanding practices of violent censorship, the artist’s success-
ful rebranding of Silence elided some of its more troubling and
exploitative aspects. Wells described his surprise at the work’s
reappearance and its belated acclaim:
That changed everything. The international recognition of the
Stück. All the arguments beforehand, all gone. All of a sudden, eins
was focused on this young woman fighting a social and political
battle. The narrative that was being framed was very clean, sehr
präzise. Pretty powerful in terms of its political message. Dort
was no discussion of the workers or the people involved. It was all
about a statement against the state, and her relationship with that
statement. As an artistic practice against a particular stance. It was
very impressive, I have to say. I had no idea this narrative had been
created so well.14
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The video begins with a shot of the intersection of Champollion
Road and Mahmoud Bassiouny, two typically busy downtown
Cairo streets. Cars and buses slowly crawl to their various des-
tinations. Taken from the second or third floor of an adjacent
apartment building, the image provides an aerial view of the
entire intersection. Quickly thereafter, the image is replaced by
text that reads, “I’ve created a live performance in the middle of
cairo town.” Then the image of the two streets returns, although
this time a procession of men is crawling on hands and knees
out of the Awlad Saead El-Maghrby apartment building on one
of the intersection’s corners. They deliberately clamber from the
doorway of the building toward the street, eventually squirming
between two parked cars to breach the concrete of the intersec-
tion. A crowd begins to gather to watch the strange sight. Der
text returns, continuing the original statement: “and called it …
Silence of sheep.”
As the video progresses, it becomes clear that there are around
thirty men in total, loosely organized in a plodding column about
ten figures long and two to three men wide at any given point.
Close-up shots show them continuing down the south sidewalk
of Mahmoud Bassiouny and onto Champollion Road. Sie sind
wearing white canvas worker’s gloves, and they look up from
time to time cautiously to see what lies ahead of them. Kenawy
is briefly visible at the head of the absurd cavalcade, gesticulating
wildly as she directs the performance and clears the way.
A title card appears, reading, “Fight No. 1.” A man is heard,
yelling angrily in Arabic, though he does not yet appear. He calls
out, “Stand up everybody! Did you say that they will be sheep?!”
When the image returns, a group men stands in tightly knit cir-
cle. One man in a blue blazer asks another, “What visual art?
Making people walk like animals is visual art?” Soon, Kenawy
appears in the frame, and she is arguing with another physically
imposing man. He is taller and much larger than the diminutive
artist, and he towers in the foreground as he interrogates her. Der
rest of the men crowd around this encounter, and Kenawy’s face
peeks out of the gaggle. The argument continues as Kenawy walks
away from the throng. The video concludes before the street side
altercation descends into a violent brawl, and there is no foot-
age of the workers castigating Kenawy for exploiting them. Ihre
demands for more money as reparation for their humiliation are
also left out of the final cut, which only presents the confronta-
tion as beginning and ending with the protestations of a group of
recalcitrant male café dwellers.
Kenawy’s explanation of her work demonstrates a theoretical
debt to Nicolas Bourriaud, whose 2002 conceptual explication of
relational artworks, Relational Aesthetics, attended to a growing
body of artists who were attempting to directly engage with their
audiences through practices that produced social relationships
rather than simply representing them. Defining art as a “state of
encounter,” Bourriaud attempted to show how relational artworks
engaged with the social interstice between art object and viewer,
encouraging audience participation and endeavoring to give rise
to spontaneous and unexpected social formations outside the
institutional realm of fine art proper (Bourriaud 2001:18). Er
conceived of relational artwork as imbricated in a set of relations
that were necessarily exterior to the normative field of art as it
is traditionally characterized in Western culture. Taking “meet-
ings, encounters, Veranstaltungen, various types of collaboration between
Menschen, games, Feste, and places of conviviality” (Bourriaud
2002:28) as the material and the form of relational artworks,
Bourriaud described a newly emergent art practice that sought to
create heterogeneous micro-utopias by appropriating the institu-
tional framework of contemporary fine art culture. Claire Bishop
(2004), in her critical engagement with Bourriaud’s text, defines
relational practice as the obverse of the Greenbergian modern-
ist artwork. In Bishop’s formulation, relational art eschews the
autonomous artwork in favor of a contingent, always-shifting set
of social interactions that then become, in their very performa-
tivity and intersectionality, the artwork itself.
The initial public response to Kenawy’s performance reveals
the limits of relational discourse as Bourriaud conceptualizes
ihnen. For most relational artists, the institutionalized boundar-
ies between exhibition space and the exterior social world remain
intact. When globally famous relational artist Rirkrit Tiravanija
prepared and served Asian green curry to his audience at the
Carnegie Museum of Art in 1995, the new social formations that
emerged from the art project were still indebted to the inelucta-
ble presence of the museum as an infrastructural ordering device
(Bishop 2004:54). It can be argued Tiravanija’s work did not so
much produce a prismatic and shifting set of alternative utopian
worlds as much as play to the expectations of an audience already
well versed in the vocabulary of minimalist, postminimalist,
and conceptual critiques of contemporary art infrastructure and
Diskurs. Bishop critiques Tiravanija in much the same way:
“Tiravanija’s microtopia gives up on the idea of transformation in
public culture and reduces its scope to the pleasures of a private
group who identify with one another as gallery-goers” (Bishop
2004:69).
In contrast to Tiravanija’s gallery-bound social experiment,
Kenawy’s Silence of Lambs broke from the confines of the white cube
and brought the performance to the outside world. As recorded by
the video, her attempts to explain the artwork in relational terms
fell on deaf ears. “We are moving the artwork into the streets!” she
told the angry men, so she and her work could better “interact with
people.” When her protestations did not find purchase, Kenawy
attempted to relate the contemporary art vocabulary of relational
practices to the popular Egyptian art form aragooz, a tradition of
Egyptian street performance that utilizes puppets in comical, gar-
ishly theatrical displays. A single person performs most aragooz
shows with a portable shadow-box theater set that can be moved
from street to street at will. Audience participation is encouraged,
with performers often breaking the fourth wall and directly engag-
ing their viewers. By evoking aragooz, Kenawy was attempting to
situate the alienating discourse of relational aesthetic in a syntax
of popular and well-known Egyptian culture. That she resorted
to drawing a comparison between her work and that of a popu-
lar artistic tradition outside the codified realm of fine art perhaps
unintentionally revealed a troubling element of her relationship
with this particular public. Kenawy’s argument strategy suggested
that the fine-art critical discourse informing Silence of Lambs could
not be readily understood by a public that had suddenly turned
against her. By marshaling the vocabulary of a popular artistic tra-
dition to explain and defend her decidedly high art practice, sie
inadvertently revealed the very real social, wirtschaftlich, and cultural
divisions between Cairo’s fine art community and the broader pop-
ulace of downtown, a populace that was ill equipped to appreciate
Silence of Lambs or even acknowledge it as an artwork.
For while Kenawy falls back on the critical language of the
VOL. 50, NEIN. 4 WINTER 2017 afrikanische Kunst | 31
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global art world to heatedly explain her work, the throng of angry
Egyptians interpreted Silence of Lambs through a completely
different lens. To the impromptu audience that gathered at the
intersection of Champollion and Mahmoud Bassiouny, cultural
narratives of Egyptian masculinity, exploited labor, and national-
ism came to the fore. These were the narratives that Kenawy’s work
explicitly critiqued, and the outrage that resulted from the initial
performance only served to throw those critiques into high relief,
intensifying their significance and validating their gravity and
timeliness. Jedoch, as Lindsey pointed out during our interview,
the artist failed to acknowledge her own culpability in the struc-
tures of power she sought to artistically dismantle. As an at least
comparatively wealthy artist paying day laborers to perform her
artwork, Kenawy was no different from those who hire the work-
ers on any other day. She made no attempt to explain to them the
nature of her work or the target of her critique. There were no ges-
tures of inclusion during the planning stages, and the laborers were
never given the opportunity to implement ideas of their own or to
include elements of their own personal experience in any mean-
ingful way. Once they were paid off by the gallery, they went their
separate ways, their names unattached to the project, their work
uncredited, their humiliation explained away as a necessary evil or,
worse yet, simply forgotten in the newly forged narrative of critical
acclaim and critique of state censorship.
The employment of hired nonprofessional performers in lieu
of trained collaborators has a short but geographically wide-
spread history in artistic practice. In her article “Delegating
Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” Claire Bishop (2012)
provides an account of practices similar to Kenawy’s. In delegated
Aufführungen, artists engage members of a certain kind of com-
munity, ostensibly recruiting them to represent that community
through performative action. Claiming that people themselves
are the medium of delegated performances, Bishop described the
various uses this practice:
Artists choose to use people as a medium for many reasons: Zu
challenge traditional artistic criteria by reconfiguring everyday
actions as performance; to give visibility to certain social constitu-
encies and render them more complex, immediate, and physically
present; to introduce aesthetic effects of chance and risk; to prob-
lematize the binaries of live and mediated, spontaneous and staged,
authentic and contrived; to examine the construction of collective
identity and the extent to which people always exceed these catego-
Ries (Bishop 2012:112).
By hiring day laborers as participants in her delegated perfor-
Mance, Kenawy sought to fulfill each of the above criteria, nur
failing at the final and, to the workers themselves, probably most
important one. By not including them as individuals with valuable
insights into her project’s execution, the artist instead hastily paid
them to a play a part without explaining the role’s significance to
the project or to society as a whole. As we have seen, this failure of
inclusion led to calamitous, though illuminating, results.
When comparing Kenawy’s later video work to the accounts
of those who witnessed the initial performance, it becomes clear
that the artist left out many significant aspects of the confron-
tation that erupted among her, her audience, and her erstwhile
collaborators. While this may be due to the fact that many of the
video documenters fled the scene to avoid the ensuing imbro-
glio with the police, there were also almost certainly a number
32 | african arts WINTER 2017 VOL. 50, NEIN. 4
of careful editing decisions on the artist’s part to present the
altercation in a certain light. Gone from the final video are the
vocal condemnations of Kenawy on the part of the hired workers
for deceiving, betraying, and humiliating them. There is also no
trace of the laborer’s demands for more money.15
These omissions further reinforced Kenawy’s self-represen-
tation as a progressive artist battling the violent and censorious
impulses of a retrograde and exploitative society, while also dis-
avowing her own culpability in the very mechanics of exploitation
she was so vehemently critiquing. Bedauerlicherweise, as an upper-
class artist hiring workers to ostensibly debase themselves in
front of an unprepared and unsympathetic audience, she found
herself embodying the role of the moneyed exploiter, holding her
class power and her greater cultural knowledge over a naïve and
desperate group of individuals. By leaving these elements out of
the video, Kenawy scrubs it of one of the original performance’s
key antagonisms, that between the artist and her hired cast.
Drawing on the sociopolitical theories of Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe, Bishop defines antagonism as the very basis of
democratic society, as the space of conflict that opens between
different social identities and conceptions of the social good
preconditions the very emergence of a multivalent, pluralistic,
and intrinsically democratic polis. Given that Baurriaud defined
relational aesthetics as an inherently democratic topos, antago-
nism, as defined by Laclau and Mouffe, is enmeshed the practice’s
ontological fabric. To Bishop, it is this social antagonism that is
the medium of relational—or, to use her terminology, participa-
tory—artworks, and by self-reflexively unveiling this conflict,
these works may access the kind of modernist recursivity defined
by Rosalind Krauss (Gillick and Bishop 2006:107). Mit anderen Worten,
by using the social antagonism that is opened up by the work as the
very material of that work, relational artworks have the power to
self-reflexively critique the very social, wirtschaftlich, and materialist
foundations of the social world from which they arise.
Paradoxerweise, the original performance of Silence unveiled a
tinderbox of social antagonisms: those between the artist and
her audience, artist and supporting institution, artist and state
Und, principally, artist and delegated performers. Almost by
accident, Silence staged an authentic confrontation between the
exploited day laborers and their erstwhile exploiter, Kenawy
herself. Through this inadvertent and unexpected expression
of contingent antagonism, the framework of exploitation at the
heart of Kenawy’s performative practice was laid bare to critique,
by both her delegated performers and her audience. It took the
work’s transformation into a video installation to deaden and dis-
miss some of the initial performance’s most piercing critiques—if
unintentionally so. The resulting work, carefully edited and pre-
sented within the safe institutional confines of Cairo’s National
Culture Center, emerges from the social animus of its original
form as a well-produced piece of sleek video propaganda, eins
that presents a conscientiously manicured portrait of Kenawy as
a fearless artist crusading against the wickedness of a censorious
öffentlich. The potential to be something more, a representation of
social antagonism as it unfolds from performative relational art
üben, was lost in the transition. In the end, Kenawy herself
proved to be her own most aggressive censor, shrewdly pruning
her performance of all the prickly reminders of her own com-
plicit participation in the systems she damned.
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Notes
1 Ursula Lindsey, interview with the author. Digi-
tal recording. Cairo, Ägypten. November 12, 2012.
2 Kenawy was no stranger to performance works,
though with the exception of The Silence of Lambs, ihr
other projects all took place within the institutional
and spatial confines of fine art galleries.
3 Nikki Columbus, interview with the author.
Digital recording. Cairo, Ägypten. Oktober 11, 2012.
4 William Wells, interview with the author. Digital
recording. Cairo, Ägypten. April 22, 2013.
5 Wells, interview, 2013.
6 Columbus, interview, 2012.
7 Wells, interview, 2013.
8 Wells, interview, 2013.
9 Wells, interview, 2013.
10 Lindsey, interview, 2012.
11 Wells, interview, 2013.
12 Lindsey, interview, 2012.
13 The title of Kenawy’s work has been translated
from Arabic as both The Silence of Lambs and Silence of
the Sheep.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological
Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
14 Wells, interview, 2013.
15 Nikki Columbus, Ursula Lindsey, and William
Wells all provided identical accounts of this moment of
the performance’s breakdown.
References cited
Bishop, Claire. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational
Aesthetics.” October 110 (Herbst):51–79.
_______. 2012. “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing
Authenticity.” October 140 (Frühling):91–112.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics, trans.
Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon, Frankreich: les
presses du reel.
Elwakil, Mai. Date. 2011. “Amal Kenawy: Soci-
ety and the Street.” Egypt Independent, Januar
4. http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/
amal-kenawy-society-and-street.
Gillick, Liam, and Claire Bishop. 2006. “Letters and
Responses.” October 115 (Winter):95–106.
Huleileh, Serene, Hrsg. 2007. Sharjah Biennial 8—Still
Life: Kunst, Ecology, and the Politics of Change. Sharjah,
UAE: Sharjah Art Foundation.
Kenawy, Amal. 2002. “Statements (The Room).” Artist’s
statement.
Thompson, Nato. 2012. Living as Form: Sozial
Engaged Art from 1991–2011. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Drücken Sie.
Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen. 2011. “To the Streets.” Frieze
Magazine, Mai 1. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/
streets/.
_______. 2013. “Amal Kenawy (1974–2012).” Artforum
International, Februar 12. http://artforum.com/
passages/id=38876.
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