Experiments in Visual Narrative is my 3rd solo exhibition in January 2020. The show was in Ahmed Bassiouny Gallery located in the Faculty of Art Education in Cairo, Egypt.
The show featured three experiments in visual narrative alternating between text and image.
The first experiment was inspired by a poem titled “The Dead Flag Blues” by Efrim Menuck from the post rock group Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The poem describes an apocalyptic scene against the haunting repetitive drone filled, noise charged music of the group. I decided to use the lyrics as an approach to create a text based visual narrative in a non-sequitur manner. The images and texts are vaguely linked and the interpretation is left for the viewer. The non-logical juxtaposition of text and image give the works a hallucinatory feel reminiscent of the gloomy words of the poem. The whole narrative takes place in 10 drawings accompanied by the text from the poem.
The second experiment features an even more abstract relation between text and image. The text is taken from the 1999 novel based movie “Fight club” written by Chuck Palahniuk. In the movie the protagonist quotes articles in some old issues of Reader’s Digest in which human organs write about themselves in the first person “I’m Jack’s Liver” and uses those phrases as an expression of his own turmoil “I’m Jack’s complete lack of surprise”. This disassociation that takes place in speaking about oneself in the third voice was the main driving force behind the second experiment which features five of many sketches I made while my father was sick with cancer in an attempt to describe that surreal experience of losing a loved one.
The third experiment depends on pure visual communication lacking any textual support in a total of 10 drawings. The main theme is an examination of the relation between life on a cellular level and the echos of those complex system in larger macrocosmic system. From virus particles that stand on he edge of life and non-life, bacterium, embryonic cells to more complex forms of life in fish, amphibians and birds all the way to social and economic capitalist business models and big data information systems. It is an examination of an ancient microcosm against a contemporary macrocosm.
