RE-

Re- moves both forward and backwards in time, implying repetition and undoing.

With re-, I am looking at the way I work with photography. For the past 4 years I have been going back to specific places and re-photographing them. I have been documenting the domestic spaces I live in between my hometown Cairo and San Francisco, a place I call a half-chosen exile while trying to turn it into a home.

I am constantly building an archive that remains always present. An archive I keep reaching into to re-print, re-frame and re-create photographs I see as constantly evolving and am interested in finding new lives and forms for them.

On one hand I am recording one memory, while insignificant on its own, I see it as part of a collective memory (Maurice Halbwachs), a memory for the future that will hopefully allow for an alternative history to be written.

On the other hand, this repetitive work is giving me the ability to build my own home out of photographs, creating a safe space. Art as a safety mechanism, where I can control the narrative through the choices I make in reconsidering and re- [insert verb here] my work.

How many lives can a photograph have? How often can a photograph be re-defined? How do material interventions re-frame photographs?

Acts of repetition and recreation.

Re-