The Album of Afterlives - Excerpt

Artist Statement

My work explores my mixed-race identity as both Egyptian and British, and the consequences and aftermaths of colonial systems and history on my personal family history, our migrations, and on my fragmented identity. In a 2024 project, I created an album titled The Album of Afterlives.  The album serves as an intervention in a book about Egypt, written solely by British authors with colonial involvement. I inserted my family photographs and other documents belonging to my parents and my past, as additional pages of the book, interweaving the micro/personal/ ignored histories with their geopolitical and meta narratives.  

Using layering and multiple exposure photography, both analogue film and digital, I then photographed pages of this album, making complex layered images of my different selves and pasts, the ghosts and afterlives. The ongoing and never-really-over aftermaths of colonial and imperial Britain on people's lives, and the intimate and personal, that resulted in my parents meeting and their movements across the globe, can only be responded to by attempts at creating a continuity out of conflicted fragments, and multiple layers and accretions over time. By sewing together and using an aesthetics of afterlives, ghosts, shadows, and traces of multiple moments and selves.  

About the 5 images displayed here:

1- Face - a digital image/ collage of a photograph of my Egyptian passport photograph as a teenager, melded with a medieval pattern from Islamic Cairo and an ancient Egyptian face from a tomb.  
2- Shadow - an analogue multi-exposure image of myself as an 18-year-old wearing an abaya on the balcony of our apartment in Riyadh in the 1980s, superimposed with an old postcard from my father’s things after he passed away.  
3- Album - an analogue multi exposure image of my Egyptian father and English mother, dissolved into the surface of an image of a leather book cover on a card my father had sent to my mother with wishes for her birthday.  
4- Interleaves - an analogue multi-exposure image of my mother with her German friend in Mosul, Iraq, where I was born. The friend can be seen holding a baby, which is me. Ghostly images of  Mosul, including significant historical monuments, taken by my mother, much of which was later destroyed by USA bombing and wars, can be seen in the layers of album pages.  
5- Two Halves - an analogue multi exposure photograph of a photograph taken by the secretary of boxer Muhammad Ali, of us all sitting on our sofa in Riyadh in 1989. My father later cut the photograph into two pieces. My mother and my sister on one side, and he with  Mohammad Ali on the other. After my father passed away, my mother found the other half and placed them side by side and photographed them to create a whole which she photographed and  made copies of for us. But the split was always visible. After my mother passed away, I found both  halves.