This is not a museum of old work. It is a map of a mind in motion.
What you find here spans more than two decades, from early paintings made in Cairo in the years after graduation, through periods of interruption and return, through cities and languages and lives lived between studios. Some of these works were shown. Many were not. All of them were necessary.
The hand that appears oversized in a painting from 2003 is the same hand that appears in the work being made today. The questions did not change. Only the time it took to sit with them.
Watching TV
Graduation Project - Faculty of Fine Arts, 2003 — Oil on canvas
The hand was always the beginning.
The title is ordinary. The bodies are not. These figures sit in familiar domestic stillness, doing the most passive thing a person can do. But the hands and feet are enormous, swollen beyond proportion, pressing forward as if the body has something urgent to say that the moment refuses to allow.
There is something in that gap between the mundane title and the weight of the image that felt true in 2003 and still does. We sit. We watch. And underneath, something much larger waits.
Everything that came after begins here.
Blocked
Digital - Exhibited at DI-EGY Fest, Cairo, 2017
There are shapes that arrive before the words do.
These works were made during a period of prolonged internal pressure, years in which what was happening inside and what was permitted outside existed in direct, painful contradiction. The geometric forms that cut across faces and bodies are not decorative. They are the experience of surveillance made visible. The feeling of a barrier that has no name but is felt in every room, every conversation, every moment of almost-expression.
The figures repeat. They multiply. They stand in formation without choosing to. Some face each other and cannot touch. Some face the viewer and cannot speak. The color is loud because the silence was louder.
This was the last work shown before a long return to the studio alone. It was not an ending. It was the sound of something that needed more time to become what it was trying to say.
Untitled (Two)
Acrylic on Canvas - 100×70 cm - 2021
Someone I have known for over twenty years told me something they had never told anyone. They were
forty-two years old. It was the first time they had said it out loud.
I kept thinking about what it costs to carry a question about yourself for that long. In a place where the question itself is not allowed. Among people who love you and still do not know.
I did not paint an answer. I painted the space where the question lives. Two figures who could be anyone. Who resist being named. Who asks nothing of you except that you look without deciding.
Companions
Acrylic on Canvas - 100×70 cm - 50× 70- 2023
The hand was always the beginning.
The title is ordinary. The bodies are not. These figures sit in familiar domestic stillness, doing the most passive thing a person can do. But the hands and feet are enormous, swollen beyond proportion, pressing forward as if the body has something urgent to say that the moment refuses to allow.
There is something in that gap between the mundane title and the weight of the image that felt true in 2003 and still does. We sit. We watch. And underneath, something much larger waits.
Everything that came after begins here.
Instinct
Acrylic on Canvas - 30×40 cm - 2025
Something older than thought moves through these bodies.
The pose is human. The impulse is not. A weight shifted, a head turned, a limb caught mid-decision. These are not dancers. They are not athletes. They are creatures in the moment before they know what they are about to do. That moment when the body acts before the mind catches up, when what we have trained ourselves to suppress rises anyway, wearing borrowed clothes and a borrowed face.
I keep asking myself: how much of what we call behavior is choice, and how much is simply what was always there, waiting for the right kind of quiet to come out.