On Noise, Sound & Silence
Three-Channel Video Installation & Memory Box
55th Venice Biennale – Maldives Pavilion

The Memory Box
Memory Box (sculptural elements) consists of bronze pieces, each representing an

indispensable object that is paramount in the completion of the virtual voyage.

The camera: this is a cast of my father’s camera. This is the 6x6 camera that he carried when I was a child. It looked like the 35 mm cameras. I still keep many family negatives in my archive. My father took pictures for me and for my mother brother and it stayed in function until I was fifteen years of age.

The watch: a replica of my father’s watch; I used to borrow my father’s watch till I got my first watch at the age of eleven; a pick-pocket robbed me of it one afternoon in Dokki, a suburb of Cairo, while visiting my cousins.

The Shell: this shell is similar to a shell that my grandmother used as an ashtray; she passed away when I was seven years old, and I do remember her vividly. My parents were both working and I spent most of my days with her in her large ground floor apartment and garden. My aunt –who was gorgeous and single-- used to smoke in hiding and stubs he cigarettes there; I was my aunt’s favourite child and the only one who kept her secret.

The pebble; in fact a very small shell: this is a cast of a shell that I found in Alexandria when I was 15, and it stayed with me for 34 years. My uncle had a cabin on Roshdy Beach, a beach once for the bourgeoisie in Alexandria but now long since a public beach.

The Coca Cola Bottle: this is a cast of the old shapes/forms of the bottles of the late sixties and early seventies, now back in fashion in the same size. Back then, as a child, Egypt adopted a Soviet model of socialism, and the cola drinks were absolutely tasteless, but it was a bonus for us at the end of the hot day on the beach.