Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer

Designed to evoke the type of mid-century cinema where the films that inspired Youssef Nabil's art were shown, this exhibition showcases the artist's 2015 video I Saved My Belly Dancer, a recent LACMA acquisition. It also features 11 related photographs that parallel the filmic storyline, along with contemporaneous Egyptian film posters. Like much of Nabil's work, the subject matter is subtly autobiographical and reflects his longing for the past, one that he lived vicariously through the old movies he watched obsessively on television while growing up in Cairo. Tahar Rahim performs as the artist's alter ego and the belly dancer is played by Salma Hayek. The video and photographs have a dream-like, otherworldly quality further delineated by the unearthly intensity and tonality of the color palette, which the artist hand-painted on silver gelatin prints and colorized frame by frame with concentrated, supersaturated hues.