Hasan & Husain Essop Halaal Art
All images © Goodman Gallery and the artists, 2009
In his final year of art school, Hasan Essop, a printmaking major, started working with collage. His strategy was simple: juxtapose magazine pictures of superstars in off-key landscapes. ‘I found it so difficult,’ he later told me, which is why Hasan asked a university friend to make some staged portraits of himself that he could use in his collages. Watching from a near distance, Husain, the younger of the twin Essop brothers, was impressed. Photo graphically trained, he suggested that Hasan would move out of the studio and pose himself in the everyday world of Cape Town – Husain wanted his brother’s collages to appear more real, as he would later put it to me. Exhibited at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Husain’s crude photographic collages prompted Goodman Gallery cura tor Storm Janse van Rensburg to call. He was interested. Husain floated a thought: ‘We told him about our idea to collaborate.’ Go for it, came the response. The brothers worked on five photographs, each brimful with collaged portraits of the twins doing various Muslim and nonMuslim things – washing, praying, attending a dogfight. Shot in a variety of non-descript locations in their native Cape Town, these early photos established the
template for their subsequent practice. The Essop brothers’ ongoing photographic project of self-representation refuses a lot of things: the monochrome sobriety of documentary; a stable view on the working class lives of many South African Muslims; sombreness. Respectful rather than critical of Islamic theology, you could argue that their work is marked by a subtle activist agenda. Let me clarify. When last I met the brothers for a chat, they told me about visiting Hamburg, the city where Mohamed Atta and other key protagonists in the 9/11 attacks lived for a while. ‘Germans had this impression that Islam was strictly a terrorist religion,’ offered Husain. ‘Everybody we confronted only knew Osama bin Laden – they didn’t know the prophet Mohamed.’ Following an exhibition in the German port city, viewers asked lots of questions. ‘We spent more time speaking about our religion than art, because they didn’t know anything about the beauty of Islam, that there is another side,’ offered Husain. The Essop brothers’ photographic work, which has matured, losing the jerky cut ‘n paste feel and overfull compositional frame of their early work, offers a sincere and engaged response to this damaging image. •
selected by
Sean O’Toole