Site-specific sculpture, wood and fired white stoneware figurines, 4.5 × 4.5 × 1.5 m
Hotel Lobby, Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel, Cairo, Egypt, 2024
Commissioned by ADD Art for Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel
Photography: Orama Productions
From the Bottom to the Top and Vice Versa is a site-specific sculpture inspired by Cairo — its energy, its constant movement, and its layered, overwhelming sounds. Viewed from outside, the city can appear purely chaotic; yet beneath that surface, some underlying order persists and holds. In this work, I explore the tension between harmony and randomness as two forces that are never fully separable in Cairo’s urban life. The piece extends an inquiry I began in an earlier installation from 2012, It’s Not As Easy As It May Have Seemed to Be, into structure, improvisation, and the particular vitality of things that appear precarious but endure.
From the Bottom to the Top and Vice Versa was commissioned by ADD Art as part of a programme of site-specific commissions for the Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel — Egypt’s first dedicated ‘art hotel’, presenting works by Egyptian contemporary artists.
From the Bottom to the Top and Vice Versa, as viewed from the hotel lobby, site-specific sculpture, wood and fired white stoneware figurines, Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel, Cairo, 2024From the Bottom to the Top and Vice Versa, as viewed from the hotel lobby, site-specific sculpture, wood and fired white stoneware figurines, Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel, Cairo, 2024From the Bottom to the Top and Vice Versa, as viewed from the hotel lobby, site-specific sculpture, wood and fired white stoneware figurines, Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel, Cairo, 2024From the Bottom to the Top and Vice Versa (detail), site-specific sculpture, wood and fired white stoneware figurines, Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel, Cairo, 2024From the Bottom to the Top and Vice Versa (detail), site-specific sculpture, wood and fired white stoneware figurines, Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel, Cairo, 2024From the Bottom to the Top and Vice Versa (detail), site-specific sculpture, wood and fired white stoneware figurines, Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel, Cairo, 2024From the Bottom to the Top and Vice Versa (detail), site-specific sculpture, wood and fired white stoneware figurines, Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel, Cairo, 2024From the Bottom to the Top and Vice Versa (detail), site-specific sculpture, wood and fired white stoneware figurines, Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel, Cairo, 2024From the Bottom to the Top and Vice Versa (detail), site-specific sculpture, wood and fired white stoneware figurines, Hyatt Centric Cairo West Hotel, Cairo, 2024
Bassem Yousri 