Cairo Calling
Marcus Field, Editor of Blueprint

Britain's relationship with the Middle East is like a long and tempestuous love affair which for the last ten years has certainly been more off than on. Despite the historically deep connections (trading, religious conflicts, colonial occupation and tourism - from the Pyramids to Petra) perception of the region in Europe is now tainted by images of aggression, destruction and disharmony. It is to challenge this view that the London-based Lebanese graphic designer Rana Salam has collaborated with the Institute of International Visual Arts to mount an exhibition of Egyptian film posters on billboard sites around London this month.

Salam, 32, was born and brought up in Beirut, an ancient and cosmopolitan trading city wrecked by the 15 years of civil war which ended in 1991. The daughter of a Cambridge-trained architect, Salam travelled often to Britain and was later educated at the American school in Beirut. Her exposure to the wealth and order of western life was in juxtaposition to the daily trials of dealing with air raids and the chaos of war. She assimilated elements of both cultures, cruising the corniche on a scooter (to the shock of the more conservative locals) but also appreciating the richness of indigenous traditions such as the cooking, belly dancing and - most influential in her later work - the graphics and visual culture around her.

Salam studied graphics at St Martins, but it wasn't until she started a post-graduate course at the Royal College of Art in 1990 that she began seriously to explore communications design in the Middle East. "The RCA pushed me to look at my own culture," she says. "I went back and began to research. That is when I came across this man who painted posters." Salam discovered that the fly posters and billboards which cover and colour cities from Cairo to Baghdad - whether depicting political or religious leaders, movie heroes or pop stars - are the products of just a handful of studios based in Egypt and the Lebanon. In Beirut the Christian Armenian artist called Hawarian paints many of the posters which appear around the city for pop concerts, as well as those of more serious looking religious leaders that you might see in Syria or Iraq.

Each image is a one-off, squared up and painted from photographs in bright hyper-real colours. "I make them look better than reality," he says. "I remove all their defaults." The cost of these paintings is so modest and the tradition so respected, that printing is not considered an alternative. The process for making film posters is different. For movies in Arabic, the products of Egyptian studios Ü once the third largest film industry in the world Ü posters are painted and then reproduced in Cairo for distribution across the Middle East. As part of her MA thesis, Salam visited artists in the Egyptian capital to research the process. Each image is painted from squared up film stills before being transferred in a time-consuming process to printing plates. This process, and the method of printing each of the four colours one at a time, has been used by artists from Toulouse-Lautrec to Andy Warhol. The result is a giant (6m x 3m), vividly coloured image separated out onto 24 sheets of thin paper, each one numbered to aid reassembly. Unlike modern printing processes, the images are not made up of dots, but solid swathes of colour with every line of the artist's work still visible.

Salam has amassed an impressive collection of Egyptian film posters. Three have been chosen three to be reproduced and pasted up around London. The fact that they have been transferred in a high-tech scanning and printing process is suitably subtle comment on the relationship between Europe and the Middle East: we might try to subvert and sanitise Arab culture, but Ü happily Ü this is a love affair that just will not die.

This text is reproduced from Blueprint, the magazine of architecture, design and contemporary culture, June 1999 issue - with thanks.

Photos: Lee Funnell