Liwan Art Gallery | 23 Hassan Assem, Zamalek, Cairo | Egypt

‘Safe Haven’: A Student’s Dream World Inspires a Professor’s Art (Mona Abu Al-Nasr)
Ali Hassaan’s exhibition “Safe Haven”, shows a young woman living between dreams and reality. Visitors might think the scenes in the paintings are the product of the artist’s imagination. In fact, the paintings tell the story of a female fine arts student from Upper Egypt, who told the art professor of living between dreams and reality. He uses the young woman’s words in the exhibition: “I wake up screaming. I see bright spots scattered across the floor of the room. They are the scales of my dead fish. My colourful fish, just like me, reject the enclosed glass bowl where they live, and have leapt out of it. They, like me, dream of breathing air in another way, even if they do so for the last time in their lives. Our dreams end up together on the edge of that glass aquarium where we live. We no longer have a safe haven.”
‘Safe Havens’ Invaded: In his work Hassaan sought to capture “the fantasy and wild imaginings of dreams” and to express the feeling of escape that the daydreams give the young woman. To achieve that he draws her in most of the paintings surrounded by things that represent her “safe havens”, such as pet cats, hens, and fish. This domestic world, however, is often invaded by “gripping images” of fiercer creatures, like hyenas and predatory birds.

One of the most prominent works on display is a painting inspired by a dream that the young woman would wear her grandmother’s white wedding dress on her wedding day. “Despite the innocence of the dream,” Hassaan said, “she cannot forget a nightmare she had one day of being surrounded by predators the moment she puts on the dress—as if dream and nightmare were two sides of the same coin.”
“I thought of a way to present the symbols the girl spoke of by adding other fantasies as if they were an extension of her dreams.”
In the “Motorcycle” painting, a parrot sits symbolically on the young woman’s shoulder. “It is as if the bird had become the girl’s partner in her dream of flying temporarily, even if only on a motorcycle—a dream her brother used to object to.”
There are about 40 paintings in the exhibition. The artist used raw oil colours for richness, as well as bright, spontaneous colours to convey the woman’s dream world.

My mom tells me that dreams are deceptive. They always grant us spacious areas and then capture them from us when we wake up.. My mom tells me that dreams are creatures that do not belong to our realm. We need to stay away from them as far as possible.
But I have a lot of dreams. I always have dreams.. I have a dream of wearing my grand-mom’s white wedding dress.. I have a dream of riding a motorcycle.. I have a dream of riding those colored wooden horses spinning me quickly.. I don’t get dizzy and I never fall from above them.. as I always fall in my real life.
My real life breaks through my dreams.. It scatters rust on my room door latch, so I never lock it.. It’s waiting for me to get back to bed, I see it hanging on the curtains of my room, waiting for me to fall asleep.. Then it brings with it other dreams.. Black cats with shiny eyes.. Fishes with protruding eyes.. Huge hyenas tearing my wedding dress.

I awake screaming.. I saw scattered bright spots on the floor of the room.. These are the scales of my dead fishes.. My colorful fishes, like me, refuse that narrow glass space in which they live and jump out of it.. They, like me, have a dream of breathing air in another way, even if they do it for the last time in their life..

Our dreams get to an end together on the edge of that glass basin in which we lead life.. We no longer have a safe haven.

Ali hassaan 2021