Heba Y. Amin: When I see the future, I close my eyes

The Mosaic Rooms announces the first UK solo exhibition of artist Heba Y. Amin. This exhibition presents the latest iterations of three distinct and evolving bodies of work by the artist: Project Speak2Tweet, The General’s Stork and Operation Sunken Sea. All stem from real life subjects; from the new technological formats that were instrumental in Egypt’s revolution, to a migratory bird turned international ‘spy’, and finally a proposal to ‘solve’ the migration crisis by draining the Mediterranean Sea.

Amin investigates how the elusive narratives of regional politics in the Middle East relate to global concerns. Her research-based, multimedia works take speculative, and sometimes satirical, approaches to understanding these historical events and processes.

Alongside performances and interventions, Amin’s research integrates film, photography, and digital technology in order to think through present-day issues and the potential future significance of occluded stories and archived, largely overlooked, material. The research incorporated within these works will be added to by the artist as the show unfolds.

The exhibition is curated by Anthony Downey.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of events. This will include the launch of a new book by Amin and Downey, Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork (Sternberg Press, 2020). Through the lens of paranoia that can lead to a bird being accused of spying, this volume reveals, with contributions from Adam Harvey, Adel Iskandar, Haitham Mossad, and Laura Poitras, the extent to which military techniques of visualization define and ultimately delimit the topography of the Middle East.

Heba Y. Amin is a multi-media artist from Egypt. She works with political themes and archival history, using mediums including film, photography, archival material, lecture performance and installation. Amin teaches at Bard College Berlin, is a doctorate fellow in art history at Freie Universität, and a current Field of Vision fellow in New York. She is the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal, and co-curator for the biennial residency program DEFAULT with Ramdom Association.

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