The Road to Oshtoora, 2015.

Installation of wooden sculptures
Oshtoora Festival, Ras Sudr desert, Sinai, Egypt, 2015
Photography (images 7–8): Yalda Younes

The Road to Oshtoora is a site-specific installation made for the inaugural edition of the Oshtoora Festival in the Ras Sudr desert, Sinai. The work consists of a group of oversized, three-legged wooden figures — larger than life, developed in collaboration with craftsmen who typically build butchers’ tables. Their form draws on the clay figurines I made for my earlier work It’s Not As Easy As It May Have Seemed to Be (2012), here translated into raw wood and scaled up into something monumental.

The figures were placed just outside the festival camp, oriented toward it — as if walking in its direction, or toward the sea, mirroring the movement of the audience arriving at the site. The material sat naturally in the landscape: the rough, unfinished wood belonged to the desert terrain.