Storm Over Cairo mobile

Storm Over Cairo is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, an Al Serkal Research Grant and a Mophradat Writing Sabbatical Grant.

My text was read by the following interlocutors, who generously shared feedback that was formative to the writing: Amy Cheung, Elizabeth Fox, Iman Mersal, David Puig, Thalia Rubio, and Sarah Sarofim.

Storm Over Cairo Coming soon in 2027

Storm Over Cairo is a book made over a decade, part of the ongoing project The Loudspeaker and the Tower.

Beginning in 2014, I spent roughly five years hiring taxi drivers and circling the city's edges at night, photographing the new mosque architecture rising along the Ring Road and the highways that follow the Nile: minarets lit in green and blue neon, loudspeakers strapped to streetlights, prayer halls fused with gas stations, workshops and apartment blocks. Over those years I made some three hundred photographs of a religious architecture that no official plan accounts for, built instead through improvised acts of construction, wiring and repair.

I began the drives as a way back into a city I had left and a faith I had lost, and they became a way of asking who builds these mosques, who is heard, and whose knowledge gets to stand. The book answers through the people I spent years talking to along those roads — the electricians, brickmakers, caretakers, farmers, drivers, small developers and Al-Azhar sheikhs who build, light, design, maintain and fund this architecture, and whose words carry a history the official plans leave out.

A minaret, it turns out, is a practical key as often as a spiritual beacon: a small prayer hall can secure an electricity connection for a whole development. Seen through a windscreen, abundance looks like devotion. Traced through permits, it looks like strategy. The book holds both.

I made image and text as two recordings of the same circling. The photographs are the outward windscreen; the writing is the inward drift, moving between reportage, the deep history of mosque and road building in Egypt, and a personal reckoning with my mother's faith and her death. The text refuses chronological order. The photographs I organised by place, gathering them into three plate signatures for the three geographies I made them in. Neither element illustrates the other. They turn around the same axis, the way the drives circled the same road and the same grief.

all projects

Storm Over Cairo Coming soon in 2024

Storm Over Cairo is an artist publication created as part of The Loudspeaker and the Tower project, taking readers on a journey along Cairo's ring road and roads tracing the Nile. It brings to life new desert housing projects, illegally built mosques on agricultural land, and the city's rich soundscapes, while also interweaving ghosts from my past. After nearly ten years of photographing new mosque constructions and interviewing residents, I merge these voices with a personal essay on migration, grief, and gender tensions, all within the framework of a circular narrative that mirrors my physical and spiritual journey on the ring road.

The publication consists of two parts: newspaper zines and a book. The zines, placed inside the book, are organized by specific roads and contain photographs that accumulate physical imprints from readers' bodies, echoing how Cairo's landscape is shaped by the actions of its inhabitants. This tactile interaction adds a personal dimension, turning the newspapers into unique artifacts. The use of this format, often linked to state media and propaganda, mirrors how informally built mosques project alternative narratives through their loudspeakers, subverting official discourse. In this way, the project explores themes of surveillance, control, and resistance, while the accompanying book weaves together interviews and personal reflections to offer a multi-layered exploration of Cairo's urban and socio-political landscape.