All the Important Issues, 2009

Mixed-media installation — India ink wall drawings, drawings on canvas, paper, and papyrus, white stoneware figurines, video projection
MFA Thesis Exhibition, Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA, 2009
Photography: David Miranda

All the Important Issues marked a turning point in my practice. Working toward my MFA at Tyler School of Art, I broke with the figurative painting tradition I had trained in, and began treating space itself as my canvas. The exhibition brought together India ink wall drawings, works on canvas, paper, and papyrus, hand-modeled white stoneware figurines, and a video projection — the film All the Important Issues (2008–2012), which also functions as a standalone work. The installation was where I first began thinking of what I make as a narrative and a context rather than an object.

The title speaks to what was actually on my mind across those two years: being far from home; the socio-political reality I had grown up in and was now critically reflecting on from a distance; and a growing resistance to the expectations I encountered in the American art world — a pressure to ‘represent’ my Egyptianness, to make my origins legible as subject matter. I refused that. I wanted to talk about myself, my history, and the human condition more broadly — not as an Egyptian artist in America, but simply as a person thinking through the world. The work is playful, restless, and deliberately eclectic: a record of someone who has just set themselves free.

The installation incorporates the video All the Important Issues, which also exists as a standalone film.