Lost Referents of Some
Attraction: Malak Helmy
part of AUC_LAB
Notes on Practice

In 2014 Kaya Behkalam, assistant professor of time-based media at the art department of the American University in Cairo and director of the Sharjah Art Gallery at AUC at the time, approached me about creating a series of publications highlighting the work of select contemporary Egyptian artists. The first book in the series focused on the work of Malak Helmy. Helmy is based in Cairo, and her art focuses on video, text-based works, and collective initiatives. Much of her video work visually references the new cultural and architectural constructs of Egypt, disputing their too-easy claim on reality and seeking a truer center for psychical meaning. [excerpted from Arte East]

The book was published by Revolver Publishing on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Malak Helmy - Lost Referents of Some Attraction’ at the Sharjah Art Gallery in Cairo. It is edited by Kaya Behkalam and Anneka Lenssen, with texts from Sarah Rifky and Matthew Rana. In it we get a glimpse of video works by Helmy (‘Keyword Searches for Dust’, ‘Notes from the Carbon Coast’, ‘Records from the Excited State’) as well as works on paper (‘Some Parks that Rhyme and Don’t’, ‘Statements from the Compound’). It culminates in an interview with Helmy conducted by the editors via email over the span of a few months.

The design for this publication is very breezy: there is ample white space and fairly narrow columns that allow the information to breathe. I wanted to create a page layout that is very spacious, generous and relaxed and to let the work itself come forth, rather than crowding the pages. This also worked to create a slower reading experience, encouraging the reader to spend more time on each spread.

The series, AUC_LAB Notes on Practice, was made possible by a grant received by Behkalam from AUC. In terms of the design of the overall series, we decided to keep it loose stylistically and not necessarily have a set design across the different volumes. We felt that each book should speak to the artist’s work and as such it felt restrictive to make a very uniformly designed series. The second book in the series is ‘Dreams and Music: Hassan Khan’, which you can see here.