Inji Aflatoun

Aflatoun was born in Cairo in 1924 into a traditional Muslim family she described as "semi-feudal and bourgeois", her father, Hassan Efflatoun, was an entomologist and a landowner, their last name, meaning Plato, was a nickname that had replaced their original family name of Kashef. Aflatoun's early awareness of gender and social inequality was shaped in part by the life of her mother, Salha Efflatoun. Married at fourteen and divorced at nineteen, the same year Inji was born. Salha faced significant social and economic challenges. In 1936, she became one of Egypt's pioneering female entrepreneurs by founding the country's first fashion house, Maison Salha. Backed by nationalist banker Talaat Harb, the business promoted locally produced textiles and represented a new model of female independence through creative labor and nationalist economics. Inji Aflatoun went to school first at the Catholic school Le Collège du Sacré-Coeur. At fourteen she transferred to another school Al-Telmissany was one of the founders of the 'Art and Freedom Group,' a surrealist movement that would have an impact on Aflatoun's development as an artist. ==Activism==

In 1942, she joined Iskra, a Communist youth party. and that same year she represented the League at the first conference of Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in Paris. She wrote Thamanun milyun imraa ma'ana (Eighty Million Women with Us) in 1948 and the pamphlets were confiscated upon release however were redistributed after Aflatoun sued the Ministry of Interior. This work recounted the WIDF conference it connected different struggles and systems of oppression as well as refleced internationalist ideas. in 1949. These popular Then in 1949, she became a founding member of the First Congress of the First Peace Council of Egypt. She also created paintings at this time that reflected the harm caused by colonial rule especially to women. Aflatoun continued to write on issues that faced women into the later 1950s, such as in 1958 when she raised issues of paid maternity leave and lack of attention to women's health. She was arrested and secretly She was among the first group of women to be imprisoned for political activism in Egypt, which she later described as symbolic of women's growing political power during the Nasser era. In a 1987 interview, she reflected that the imprisonment of women for political beliefs signified not repression alone, but also recognition of women's political agency and equality with men. She continued painting while in prison and was released on July 26, 1963. After her release, Egypt's Communist party having been dissolved, she devoted most of her time to painting. She later declared: "Nasser, although he put me in prison, was a good patriot." ==Artistic influences ==

Her private art tutor, Kamel el-Telmissany, a leader in an Egyptian Surrealist collective called the Art and Freedom Group, introduced her to surrealist and cubist aesthetics. The Art and Freedom Group, or Jama’at al-Fann wa al-Hurriya in Arabic, was highly political and had connections to the larger International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art first established in Mexico. The group held exhibitions of their work and published the text ‘Long Live Degenerate Art!’ (Yahya al-Fann al-Munhatt) as a response to Nazi propaganda and rising fascism. Her paintings of that period are influenced by surrealism. She later recalled that people were astonished by her paintings and wondered "why a girl from a rich family was so tormented". She was part of two of the group's exhibitions before her interests shifted to a more realistic style to create more of a social commentary. She stopped painting from 1946 to 1948, considering that what she was painting no longer corresponded to her feelings. and public prosecutor who was from a poor family. Her interest was later renewed after visiting Luxor, Nubia, and the Egyptian oases. and attended a workshop by the artist Hammad Abdullah. During the late 1940s and 1950s, Aflatoun's work was indebted to the social realism of Mexican muralism. == Painting and imprisonment ==

She was able to continue painting during her imprisonment. Even before she herself was arrested, both her brother-in-law, Ismail Sabri Abdullah, and her husband were, with her husband being released and dying soon after. At the time of her arrest, she had been awarded the first prize for a landscape painting competition sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Information. The publicity of the award was beneficial for her in getting permission from the prison director to paint. Her work was bleak and her paintings did not sell, but she said that her and the prisoners would buy them. He would take some of her work for his own home, amassing a significant collection, and would do her favours like being more lenient and leaving the holding cell open. With this she was also able to get the help of some of the guards to smuggle some of her paintings out by wrapping them around their bodies. She continued painting while in prison and was released on July 26, 1963. == After prison ==

After her release, Egypt's Communist party having been dissolved, In the years after her liberation, she exhibited in Rome and Paris in 1967, Dresden, East Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow in 1970, Sofia in 1974, Prague in 1975, New Delhi in 1979. Her art of later years is characterised by an increasing use of large white spaces around her forms. In 1985 she recorded stories from her life covering from her early childhood to the end of her time in prison that would later be turned into her memoirs. == Exhibitions ==

Aflatoun' s work gained international recognition through exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (1952), São Paulo Biennial (1953), and Alexandria Biennial (1958). She also held solo exhibitions in cities such as Cairo, Rome, and Paris, and her works continued to be shown in international retrospectives, including at the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (2015–2016) and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC (1994). White Light White Light (al-daw' al-abyad) series was created in the 1970s, marked a significant shift in her visual style. These works featured loosely composed forms, vibrating filaments of color, and areas of unpainted canvas, giving the impression of illumination from within. Critics noted how the white canvas surface itself became a compositional element, enabling a visual language of openness and breath. According to Efflatoun, this use of white allowed the paintings "to breathe" and emphasized movement. In 2015, White Light were reintroduced to global audiences in the Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor under the theme "All the World’s Futures." The installation paired her luminous abstract works with earlier prison paintings, highlighting the tension between darkness and light across her career. ==Legacy==

Her artwork "We will not Forget" was gifted to Cairo University by the artist and was copied by the students in anti-colonial protest pamphlets and posters before the art was removed by university staff. ==See also==