Cairo Dreams 2011. Susan Hefuna

Susan Hefuna returns to The Third Line with an exhibition of aluminum sculptures and ink drawings. Her new body of work is as dynamic as it is personal, dealing subtly with fragility and vulnerability. She tackles the complexity of capturing and preserving a present moment in time through aluminum and ink. Her works navigate through space, travel the mind and capture the unedited.

“Cairo Dreams are turning the outside into the inside, making the visible invisible. Cairo Dreams are leading beyond the unimaginable”

As an artist of dual heritage, German and Egyptian, Hefuna's work reflects her experience between cultures, dealing with cross-cultural codes and constantly playing at what images mean and how they work. The outcomes create dream-like spaces where viewers connect a wide array of significances to indicators of time and location, putting together larger forms from various elements. Hefuna's drawings and sculptures set a visual and structural map of her thoughts; lines and bends, dots and curves, metal and ink, which all in due course present an abstract diagram of an architectural journey.

In her new works, Hefuna’s thoughts and inspirations are galvanized in silver aluminum and ink on paper. The lines and dots build structures through their connections. She relates how human minds are like maps, how ideas and thoughts follow a path; mapping the mind and the abstract state it is in. Hefuna hijacks the viewer beyond space and time, and from a taste of the undetectable, generates an arrangement of directions. The lattices and correlations made on paper trace a journey, each line a new course. “I start at one point and do not know how the drawing will look like in the end. I follow the dots and lines unfold before me. I don’t make a sketch beforehand, I just go,” she says.

Cairo Dreams 2011
Susan Hefuna