Qalaq
for Ikon Chiba and
Amr Saad Eyewear

In 2019, art director and multi-disciplinary artist Ikon Chiba was working with Amr Saad on a campaign to promote his newest collection of handcrafted eyewear. The collection and the campaign were centered on the theme of anxiety, which was translated into Arabic as ‘qalaq’ in a play of words. Chiba approached 7 people working in creative fields about producing artworks in response to the theme of anxiety, as well as modeling the new collection by Saad. My co-creatives and models were graphic designer Ahmad Hammoud, and DJ and vinyl devotee Ahmed Samy, film director and DOP Tahoun, photographer and DJ Malak El Sawi, makeup artist Chanel Arif (different Arif) and visual artist Hebatallah Ragab.

As a kid I was absolutely obsessed with Tetris, specifically the classic Nintendo version that I played on the chunky grey Gameboy. I used to play it so much that I would have Tetris-inspired dreams/ nightmares and it became a very real problem at some point. It spoke to my Virgo interests of organizing things and I also loved the super shrill and hectic music. So when the idea of trying to visualize how I experience anxiety came up that’s the first thing that popped into my head. It felt like such an accurate way to explain how I perceive feeling stressed or overwhelmed. I feel this great rush to clear the things I need to do fast enough, so that they don’t accummulate and get stacked and eventually collapse over my head and life, so I can avoid I hearing that jarring buzzing sound in the end.

The individual pieces of the game represent 7 tasks involved with my work: designing, amending designs, replying to emails, planning meetings, getting on phone calls and following up on payments. The things I knew for sure were that I wanted the music/ jingle to play fully at least once, that the clip needed to be shorter than 1 minute (Instagram law at the time), and obviously that I wanted each of the 7 pieces to show. It got quite complicated to make up a game that fits these criteria, so I started to play games of Tetris online while screenrecording until I played the perfect one and then I recreated it play by play within my designed version of Tetris. It was really fun and nightmarish and it took me back to the days of the chunky Gameboy and playing/ now working until my eyes burn.

Sadly Amr Saad has since taken down those anxious works created by myself and by my 6 co-creators (and even our foray into eyewear modeling), but I was very happy to have worked on it and paid homage to my childhood obsession and adult anxiety in this way and finally have a simple way of explaining how I stress.