Qarm Qart
Qarm Qart aka Carmine Cartolano was born in 1972 in Buonabitacolo (Salerno). He studied Arabic and Persian at Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples. He has been living in Cairo since 1999 where he teaches Italian as a foreign language. Qarm Qart is proud to consider himself a Cairene. Over the years, his artwork has addressed, by means of unconventional collages, digital pictures, consumer objects, toys, household items and Egyptian popular icons, issues that impact daily on the lives of all Egyptians, as well as inner mental and emotional mazes that people carry within them. In his last body of work, Qarm Qart enacts a profound reading of Naguib Mahfouz. The Cairo trilogy is the starting points for the images Qart stitches onto the tarboush, which serves as the canvas for his imagined world. Qart’s Qarboush - creative works on the tarboush - offers multiple layers of meaning in the interpretation of Egyptian past and presents. The tarboush as male headgear is now an historical relic. But what about its symbolic force of national and patriarchal privilege? The artist makes us ponder whether this privilege has gone with the tarboush itself as he ushers us into disquieting yet intriguing spaces.
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