A man sits on one side of a sofa, his face covered with a white mask, and he carries a yellow yarn ball in one hand. A white piece of clothing sits next to him, with tangled threads on top. A knitted piece along with two knitting needles rest upon the vacant part of the sofa, some how suggesting that it once housed the body of another person, possibly the man’s own partner.
In the next photo the scene is reversed. The man is gone, but his white shirt rests on the sofa. His partner has retaken her position on the sofa and has picked up her yellow knitted piece with the yarn ball resting on her lap. Her face is sheathed in a white mask and she’s knitting again, with threads from the yarn ball resting on her now vacant side.
In the third and last photo, both partners occupy the sofa. The man’s hand is wrapped around the woman’s shoulders as he holds on to the yarn ball, she to the knitted piece, and tangled threads bind them together.
Such is a photo series titled July Tale which garnered its maker, Egyptian photographer Nourhan Refaat Maayouf, the main prize at the 2016 Barclays L’Atelier, an annual South Africa-based contemporary art competition, announced in a ceremony held last week.
Nourhan Refaat Maayouf is the only Egyptian artist to have reached the finalist shortlist this year and the only Egyptian to have won the main award in the competition's history.
On miscommunication and human relationships
July Tale, as the notes accompanying the work reveal, tugs at "the complexity of a relationship. The attachment of two souls in spite of being blind and silent about their mutual issues."
The project was a product of what Maayouf calls a personal challenge she undertook in 2015 “to create one artwork a month for the duration of a year,” explains the artist in a recent phone interview with Ahram Online.
“I produced an amalgam of single photos and some photo series. In my single photos, I was very adamant on creating staged scenes, each with its own story,” she adds.
In July of that year, Maayouf embarked on a maskmaking and photography project that sought to meditate on “the issue of communication in human relationships.”
The final product was the July Tale project, in which she explored the “different understandings of and approaches to relationships. While in the past people remained with one another regardless of problems they suffered, nowadays people do not invest in preserving their relationships and let any issues get in the way.”
“In July Tale, the exhibited couple are clearly battling with miscommunication. On the one hand, the husband does not speak up about what’s going on within him, while the woman is metaphorically blind and does not really see him.”
But in spite of this communication problem, the couple, Maayouf explains, “remains attached to each other, which is manifested by the knitting process as a proof of the woman’s unceasing investment in the relationship. You also see that threads from the yarn ball bind them together as a further manifestation of this perpetual attachment. So that when one partner is gone, the other remains holding on to them.”
Maayouf first exhibited July Tale at the 26th Youth Salon held last year, and was this year encouraged to submit it to the Barclays L’Atelier's open call announced last January.
Good news arrived last month when Maayouf was informed that she had made it to the top 10 list of finalists. Maayouf then travelled to South Africa where she, along with the other finalists, attended a workshop in art professionalism and the opening of an exhibition held at Johannesburg’s Absa Gallery displaying this year’s submissions.
Maayouf won this year's Barclays L’Atelier's main prize and is due to spend a six-month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2017, followed by a solo exhibition of her work at Absa gallery.
