The Past is Always
an Invented Land
for Townhouse Gallery

In 2016 I had the opportunity to work with Townhouse Gallery, something I was very happy to do. Mariam Al Nozahy was putting on an ‘anti-exhibition’: ‘an un-curated mass of things from the collection of Amgad Naguib, downtown Cairo’s famed collector and dealer of objects, artworks, ephemera, and other relics of Egypt’s modernist past. Naguib’s rich collection was kept intact: its chaotic composition was transferred directly from his anarchic storage spaces downtown into the factory space at Townhouse. It was ruthlessly put on view with no historical narrative or tidy curatorial statements to create an emphatically disorganized anti-exhibition’. [excerpted from the exhibition text by Al Nozahy]

To get started on the poster I took my camera and visited one of Naguib’s densely piled up storage spaces - filled with his findings plus some friendly cats who rely on a steady stream of food and affection from him. I had gone with the idea of taking 1 main image for the poster, but I walked away with far too many photos and a sense of chaos . I felt unable to settle on just one image to represent his collection or to stand for what he has created in these storage spaces. And this felt very in-line with the concept behind this anti-exhibition, not to try to summarize or to direct attention to a specific angle or narrative, but to present things as they are, in their abundance, and let the viewer confront them.

So I created a busy and fragmented poster with no real focal point, evocative of Naguib’s storage spaces, his collection and the exhibition’s concept. Later on when I animated the poster (originally I had designed several still iterations) my idea was to reference the temporal aspect that lies at the core of what Naguib does and also to nod to the exhibition’s title and allude visually to the passage of time.