"This work was produced during the art residency 'Anti-Archive' in Alexandria, produced by Bassariya for Arts, May 2025.
The residency was launched from a central question: What does it mean not to collect, and not to document? It then evolved into a research and contemplative artistic space reflecting on the archive as a site of conflict, not merely a tool for preservation, and as a practice of dismantling, not accumulation.
The work was showcased in an exhibition that featured the results of two months of research and artistic experimentation, through various media employing diverse methods and approaches.
The exhibition is supported by the European Union, in cooperation with the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC)."
I leave you with this Image
Photography Installation: 4*6 photography, mirror and digital photo collage printed on plexi.
I leave you with this Image begins with a disappearance. A woman's face cut out from a studio portrait. Her image turned away. Her voice, left as a message on the back of the photograph, asks to be remembered.
Drawn from the archive of Ahmed Badawy, an Alexandrian photographer (1927-2013), the original image becomes the site of rupture. It is mirrored, suspended, fragmented, and collaged. It is reconfigured into a space where roles, desires, and memory blur.
For Nagy, a male artist working from within the patriarchal structures he questions, the image becomes a lens for confronting how gender roles are inherited: how they have shifted, expanded, exhausted, resisted, while remaining largely intact for men. The result is an imbalance passed quietly across generations, embedded in family dynamics, photographs, and expectations of care, silence, and self.
This is not a portrait. It is a collage of absence, performance, and strain. A woman's life is imagined through the gaze of a man trying to understand his own place in the story, not as an observer, but as a participant. The archival image is not repaired. It is unsettled.
Marwa Ben Halim: the residency curator
First layer
Second layer
Original photo from Badawy Archive
Original photo from Badawy Archive
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