The starting point for Rana Hamadeh’s exhibition is the darkly intriguing story of two sisters, Raya and Sakina, serial killers who in 1921 became the first women to be executed by the modern Egyptian state. Not that these events are presented in a straightforward way. The Lebanese artist has gone for a decidedly abstract, conceptual approach with her play featuring body-stockinged protagonists, modernist props and twirling jester figures. Nor, for that matter, are you even watching the play directly, but rather a film version, one that includes the play’s audience as characters and a voiceover analysing the dramatic setting. Essentially, you’re experiencing a kind of self-referential, metatextual culmination, a staging of a staging of the original trial. Or, as the grandiloquent voiceover has it, ‘an abysmal vertical column of theatrical suspension’.
The sense of different representational levels mixing and accumulating only really comes through during one, super-intense sequence, where the trickster character’s whirling skirt segues into splintering graphics accompanied by throbbing music. Apart from that, Hamadeh has clearly done plenty of research, and invokes many fascinating histories – from Egyptian nationalism to gender roles to previous versions of the sisters’ story. But whether this diffuse swirl of ideas actually translates into an effective work of art… well, the jury’s still out.