Beneath I See the Land Reel: ARD Art Institution, Cairo

Ezz Monem

4 - 26 Oct 2026

Can photography transcend conventional documentary practices to offer alternative ways of representing our fraught relationship with land?

The exhibition explores conceptual and alternative approaches to photography, questioning how the medium can transcend traditional documentary practices to offer new ways of seeing.

The show also features the work of Egyptian visual artist Mahmoud Talaat, who was selected as the 2026/27 TTLC Mentorship Award Recipient by the Through The Lens Collective.

Curated by Amin Alsaden, the exhibition is presented as part of his residency at ARD Art Institution, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Opening: Sunday, October 4, 2026, at 7:00 PM
The exhibition is open to the public till Monday, October 26, 2026
Gallery hours: open daily except Fridays from 11:00 AM to 9:00 PM

Ezz Monem, Not My Fault, 2010/2016

A chain of daily errors that may distort the context or become part of it. During one month of photographing the streets of Cairo and Alexandria in 2010, I used a corrupted memory card that randomly combined stored photographs into composite images without my intervention. The resulting images emerge from a failure in the process of digital memory and storage, producing unexpected collisions between places, moments and fragments of everyday life.

Corrupted texts are presented alongside the photographs. These texts were generated by verbally narrating stories inspired by each image and allowing my phone’s voice-to-text software to transcribe them. Errors in this automated translation transformed the original narrations into altered and sometimes incoherent versions of the stories.

The series consists of 23 glitchy prints paired with corrupted texts – stories that began as accounts of real events but, through automated processes of image and language distortion, shifted into inconsistent forms of fiction.