[Two Single Rooms] - Cairo, 2004

The work that I presented for the project "Two single Rooms" derived its basic elements from my experience of moving from Alexandria to Cairo to stay for a period not less than two months. From the beginning, I was keen not confine my personal space during this time to the space of one of the downtown hotels – where I normally stayed in may previous visits to Cairo that lasted between one to three days at the most. The considerably longer duration of my future stay in Cairo allowed me to dream of revising, if not altering completely, my previous position and relationship to the city – one that is defined by my temporary and transitory visits to the city - and its corollaries of having to sleep in an aging single room in a hotel and leave the keys at the reception desk for other people to use the same pillows and bed sheets.

So I began my extended stay in Cairo in a rented flat, a more stable and secure space than hotel rooms, through which I discovered my image in the social imagination – an image that was defined by the information given in my Egyptian I.D. card; information that I automatically stick into my pocket without much thought to how it constructs, narrates and situates my individual identity within the larger social narrative and public discourse. In Alexandria, I had not been faced with this situation, since my life within the familial context – which works as an insulating cover protecting one from colliding with the prevalent societal assumptions pertaining to the Individual and his/her relationship with others within private and public spaces – was defined by more private and familial assumptions and values deriving from the intellectual and social make-up of this particular family.

My stay in Cairo for the stated period of time, which was riddled with the parallel processes of rediscovering, re-understanding and redefining the self, led to my rising concern with I.D. cards as a referential document that depends primarily, in its reductive narrative, on the mediation of language, in addition to the visual representation (photograph) of the I.D. holder. I later depended on these same media in constructing my work as a kind of exploratory relationship evolved during that period between me and the camera – a relationship that was at times confrontational or controlling. I would often face the camera in an attempt to discover my self and gain a closer understanding of my body vis-เ-vis its visual representation (the photograph) and its textual representation (the information given in the I.D. card). At other times I would stand behind the camera, in an attempt to get to know, through it, part of the vicious nature of the city's public spaces. This resulted in a series of photographs that drew on my visual and psychological memories, which have been accumulating in me throughout my stays in the city as a visitor, as well as on the clich้ touristy images of Cairo. The dynamic of looking "at" and "though" the camera produced a visual narrative of the development of the relationship of the self, represented materially in the human body, to the private and public spaces – a narrative that will probably remain as memorabilia of this time period and all that came with it: an intense curiosity and desire to analyze and understand the self in light of social discourse. Before the culmination of my limited stay in the city, I realized that my relationship to it, as a visitor, has not yet changed since my stay was of a temporary nature, at the end of which I return back to my familial context that is geographically located in Alexandria. The hotel room remained in my imagination as the ideal private space for visitors to Cairo. For the room which was my private space for two weeks, after which it became the site of my exhibition, was the physical embodiment of my experience of the social politics of living outside of the familial context. The room and its mixture of private and public elements – the more private elements like the bed and its surrounding furniture, while the public elements being the continuous streaming of the city through the room's windows that used half of the room's wall space – participated in constructing my visual narrative. The room became the container of the questions and answers going back and forth between the city and myself during that period.