"Anachrony"
Published14 Mar 2012
Photo-artist Nermine Hammam will show her series Anachrony (2010) at the Safarkhan Gallery in Cairo on 27th March 2012, in her first solo exhibition in Egypt in three years. Photographed in the desert around Fayoum, Anachrony is a series of mixed media images that depict anonymous human forms cocooned inside long, undulating drapes of fabric in a surrealist-inspired landscape of desert and mountains. A highly personal work, Anachrony was created in reaction to three months spent by Hammam photographing patients in Egypt’s state-run Abbasiya mental asylum.
The work emerged as an effort to purge the “unexpectedly strong personal reaction elicited by my experience of the asylum. It is an anguished search for solace and a cry for help. With this work, I beg forgiveness for the unspeakable horrors that I witnessed but was unable to prevent.” Anachrony represents a ‘working through’ of powerlessness and of shame: like the stills of a film the images together form a distinct narrative of time, a movement from the dark terrors of nightmare towards the quiet possibility of hope. “It is the landscape of my psychological state and of my soul at a particular moment in my time.”
SafarKhan Gallery, Cairo, de 27 Março até 14 Abril 2012.