PURGING

Site-specific video installation- Arts Palace, Cairo Opera House, Cairo, Egypt 2009

I was always thinking about the meaning of arranging the steps of the ablution process that precedes prayer. I was thinking about it intensely, and I was also thinking about the idea of ​​performing ablution with dirt in the absence of water, and thinking about the idea of ​​wiping over something that is supposed to be clean in the absence of dirt ….. These ideas led me to that purification is a concept that is not achieved by water, dust or anything else, so purification is the decision of the human soul to wash from everything that is not clean and worldly, just as the idea of ​​cutting a strand of hair after the end of the Hajj ceremony, in order to dissolve from the world and dissolve from Ihram, all These scenes are always in my mind, and they are the main engine that I dealt with in my work.
The purification of the self from the hatred and the purity of the soul and the body together is what I wanted to emphasize in my work, and when we look at all the divine religions and even the worldly beliefs, we find that they emphasized the purity of the soul, which inevitably leads to the purity of the body, which is the sure criterion for the enjoyment of the human being as humanity. The real problem that the human race always falls in is (impurities of the psyche).

Brave New World

Site-specific video installation – Cairo Biennial 11–2010

The project Brave New World is inspired by the advertising culture of globalization media and cable news virtual world, and is a trial to explore the struggle of wealth and power. A fusion of Eastern and Western folk children’s stories and fairy tales are dismantled, reassembled and modified in structure and content to match into today’s behavioral requirements; wolves dominate the jungle in unrivaled hegemony. Dressed in sweet tuxedos and packed in a classroom where corporate language and interpersonal skills are infused in total democracy, the wolves manage to replace the fangs and canines with planned executive actions; they devour their interests by the developed new tools: political manipulation, exploitation and extortion, all with a smile. It is the Brave New World.

10 years،

1 min 11 sec video art

Arts Palace, Cairo Opera House, Cairo, Egypt 2021

1 min 11 sec video art

Arts Palace, Cairo Opera House, Cairo, Egypt 2021

From the book Exodus to the Day, which is one of the funerary texts in the chapter of the trial that the deceased recites in the hall of absolute justice, exonerating himself from every shameful act and purifying himself from every impurity in life, so recognition and tolerance mixed with pluralism in beliefs and rituals, when the ancient Egyptian believed that death It was not the end as it awaits the soul’s return to the mortal body. Among these confessional texts in the Absolute Court of Justice is his confession that “it did not prevent the flood in its season” and “did not pollute the water of the Nile” when the Nile constituted the sacred meaning of the ancient Egyptian and through the accumulations Historically, in which the land of Egypt relied on the lifeline associated with its existence, a huge building rose that blocks and prevents the lifeline from reaching the body and preventing the Nile waters from flooding, and for ten years of continuous negotiation over the right to life, the reality is still bitter, the future is ambiguous and frightening, and the end is open.

When existence is an absolute concept with unlimited attributes and does not possess material determinants, and its essence or essence is unknown outside our knowledge, and if we consider existence as devoid of meaning and significance without its predicates of beings and things that man perceives, then existence as an abstract concept is a hypothetical inference of specific beings from others that does not acquire existence. Cognitive value and meaningless, and it remains a word devoid of its content.

Existence is an inferential assumption on its existence that enters into interrelationships, and the existents are independent physical or imaginary components that can be comprehended independently of our lack of awareness of the essence of existence and time. We realize its essence so that its subjectivity is intertwined in its perceived ontological assets. 

Time, in its abstract reality, which we perceive by its effects on other things and existents, is that its temporal meaning is space. It cannot be comprehended without time accompanying it and always entering it.   Likewise, time cannot be conjectured except in terms of space, which constitutes the ontological assets, physical or imaginary. It is always changing, unlike the place that is temporally fixed in time’s perception of it and not in the mind’s perception of it, and that which exists as a place may perceive itself but does not perceive its time in which it is perceived both spatially and temporally.                                                                                              

 Time is separate from our perception of place This makes us realize the relationship of time and synchronicity intended in terms of synchronicity. Synchronicity is a description given to things and the independent assets of the external world within each existential space, which are linked to objective interrelationships between them and in their dialectical spatio-temporal externalization that is inseparable from existence as a concept that we do not realize and do not realize without our awareness In this sense, synchronicity is a temporal cut-off imposed by the occurrence and occurrence of more than one existence in one simultaneous relationship, so synchronicity is a temporary and relative severance, unlike time, which is an absolute, eternal, unlimited existence, even if synchronization with time is equal in an inseparable overlap, so there remains a concept that distinguishes it from time. So synchronicity is a relative temporal event that does not govern the existents in their existential entities, as is the case with time, which governs beings, nature and man in a totality by which we perceive, and has no external characteristics that we touch and feel except through our perceptions of ourselves, the life assets and the external world around us, and time constitutes the syndrome of existence in An absolute eternity that has no end, and simultaneity is a temporal severance of simultaneous interconnected beings with each other, and a person is not aware of time, perceptually, emotionally, or objectively, not in time. Awake or in a dream, unlike time, which is a dynamic activity that operates with great vitality in the state of human awareness and awareness of the things of nature. With time in feeling And time in the unconscious state is a state of formal association overlapping in the random passage of images of things spatially in the dreamer’s mind, which is not regulated by the perception of time as it is in the case of natural feeling reality of human life.  The mind perceives things in a temporal and spatial overlap that is perceived by the senses together first, so we find that time perceives the fixed and spatially moving things by one mechanism in one moment, which is the property of time perception of things, away from the understanding of the fixed spatial mental perception of them that time gives to the mind in its realization of the existence of things spatially, and not abstract from its perceptual time, for this reason every spatial being is only aware of a temporal intervention with it.                                  

 Wael Darweish