I am drawn to the gap between what a thing claims to be and how it actually performs. A state institution performs its authority through its architecture and its signage, whether polished or improvised. An artwork performs its own authority over whoever stands in front of it. A documentary film insists it is telling the truth while every frame is staged. I make installations and films that sit inside these gaps and scrutinize them.
Much of my work is inspired by urban settings and interactions, and my inspiration forms slowly, over time, through persistent observations. I take these elements that I encounter on a daily basis out of their original context and rebuild them into new iterations that follow a poetic logic rather than a functional one. In that shift, an object stops being useful and starts to speak: about memory, authority, survival, and the people who made or left it behind. For instance, in one body of work entitled Guideposts, I built chaotic-looking wall sculptures from tangles of pipes, bulbs, wires, and other found objects, each paired with an earnest, hand-painted instructional sign — “For Customers Only,” “Do Not Look Inside!,” or “Do Not Forget to Turn the Switch on Before Using!” — that orders the viewer around with an authority the object has not earned. Such an approach allows me to make pointed observations without lecturing, and gives the viewer room to laugh and to reconsider their own position.
I use humor deliberately, as a way to invite the viewer into a conversation, even when the subject is serious. When I look at the whole of my work, I think of myself as a storyteller — in my installations I build contexts more than objects, and in film the storytelling turns explicit. My films are experimental documentaries and docu-fictions in which I let fact and fiction blur, and I am drawn to the point where a record of something real starts behaving like a dream. In The Wardrobe Man, I went to West Jutland to research a Danish hermit who lived inside his wardrobe from 1917 until his death in 1956, and I told what I found from inside a wardrobe of my own in Cairo, recounting it to my friend as if describing a dream. Documentary footage and archival material sit alongside staged scenes, and the film stops trying to separate what happened from what I imagined — the archive becomes a place the mind wanders rather than a source to be trusted. I am not after one truth to a story; I would rather hold several at once and let the viewer judge where they contradict. I am working now on Film Romancy, a feature that returns to a romantic-comedy workshop I ran in Cairo in late 2010, weeks before the revolution. I had filmed a group of young people building characters and a love story out of their own lives; then the uprising overtook the workshop, stretched it across a year, and left the film unfinished. Fifteen years later, we reassemble the footage and perform the abandoned script again, holding their creative arguments, their lives during the upheaval, and the fiction they once wrote in a single frame, and letting a generation’s disappointment in romance stand in for the unkept promises of a revolution.
Whether I am rebuilding salvaged objects into a surreal narrative or cutting between real and staged footage, I keep asking the same question: what do the worn, improvised surfaces of public and private life reveal about the power that made them, and what happens when I look closely enough to take that power seriously?
Bassem Yousri 