The Official Institution, 2013

Mixed-media installation
Solo exhibition, Al Gazira Art Center, Zamalek, Cairo, Egypt, 2013
Photography: Adham Bakry ©2013

The Official Institution was made for a solo show at Al Gazira Art Center in 2013 — a government-run cultural institution in Zamalek, Cairo. It came at a charged moment, in the wake of the 2011 revolution, when the question of institutional power was live everywhere. Rather than addressing political events directly, I turned my attention to the institution hosting me, treating the building itself as the subject.

Growing up in Cairo, I had accumulated years of interactions with government institutions — their particular brand of visual chaos, their bureaucratic illogic, the gap between what they presented and how they actually functioned. This installation was a critique from within: an attempt to make that internal disorder visible. It was also the seed of what would become a decade-long investigation — Guideposts — which approached the same questions more obliquely, trading direct provocation for a more layered and reflective form.