Ahmed Kassim on why he uses dance as a symbol in his thought-provoking artworks

In his latest exhibition, artist Ahmed Kassim uses images of dancers to comment on political and social issues in his native Egypt and across the region. We find out more details.

There is Water in Hell, an artwork by Egyptian artist Ahmed Kassim. Courtesy Ahmed Kassim

In his previous exhibition in Dubai, Egyptian artist Ahmed Kassim likened humanity to bees, exhibiting several paintings that showed aerial views of an unnamed city populated by the insects.

In his latest show, which opened last week at Gallery Ward in Dubai, he has used the same bird’s-eye perspective, but this time the landscape is recognisable and the inhabitants are people who are dancing.

In Goddesses and Monsters, the primary characters are belly dancers, who emerge outward towards the viewer from a city on the water.

At first glance, the city seems to be Dubai – several prominent skyscrapers are clearly present, including the Burj Khalifa, the Emirates Towers and the Etisalat offices with their trademark concrete balls on top. But there are also other buildings that are not found in the city: upturned Chinese rooftops appear in the bottom of the painting as does the more compact, inner-city housing common in Cairo.

While the women dancing in the images seem to be powerful and strong, they are surrounded by fighter jets, and we wonder whether they are rising towards us or falling away.

“The dancers are symbolic,” says Kassim. “The way I see it, everyone dances in his own way through life. You have to learn to move, to manage people and places and to navigate your own experience.”

The belly dancer in particular is important to Kassim, as they have become synonymous with Egypt.

However, they also embody paradox. On the surface, they may seem shallow or uneducated, making a living from showing their body, but historically belly dancers were used as spies to get information from powerful men.

This introduces politics to the conversation, which is at the heart of the exhibition. “You can’t escape politics, especially in this region,” he says.

“It affects everything we do, say and wear. Even if you want to talk about bread, it is political – and if you want to be political – you should know how to dance, how to be sneaky.”

Belly dancers are not the only dancers depicted in the exhibition. At the entrance of the gallery is a large triptych called The Sufi Journey.

It portrays a lone Sufi dancer walking along a precipice between land and sea.

Sufis traditionally dance to find peace, Kassim explains, and this dancer is working hard to stay on that path as military tanks and large, spiked cacti serve as obstacles on the land below.

Not every piece includes people dancing, however. In one, titled Save Your Grace, women lay in a barren desert, forlorn and exhausted. They represent Egypt itself, the artist explains.

“The women here have fallen after the last dance,” he says.

“They have nothing left – they will die. In my opinion, society is now destroyed compared with how it used to be, especially in Egypt.”

With this explanation the piece becomes tragic and devoid of hope. In their hands the figures clutch pieces of cotton plant, which is the final nail in the coffin. It represents Egyptian cotton, which was once one of the country’s finest exports, but now has been bought and taken by other nations – so even this has been lost to the people.

The largest piece in the exhibition is a huge canvas more than six metres long – it is an amalgamation of all the other works and sprawls along the back wall of the gallery.

Here, the dancers collide and there are military men marching, which Kassim describes as another sort of dance.

“It is as I said, everyone is dancing, but at the same time they are fighting,” he says.

“These kinds of things affect all of us in ways that we don’t even know. The dances of life change things, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, but they can take you down paths that you never expected.”

Kassim’s style of painting may appear rough and his symbols harsh, but his work is deeply thought-provoking.

It offers a profound insight into the lives of young people across the region, who are living entrenched lives engulfed in political turmoil.

• Dancing East runs until May 10 at Gallery Ward, d3, Dubai. For more details, visit www.galleryward.com