Valley of Walls, a site-specific exhibition curated by Farida Youssef, took place in the abandoned apartment of Egypt’s former Minister of Irrigation, Ahmed Ali Kamal. The exhibition, which ran from October 12 to December 6, 2023, offered no labels, no entry point, and no conclusion, inviting visitors into a space of continuous guessing and disorientation. As part of the project, Georges & Samuel Mohsen collaborated with Youssef to document the apartment, capturing its transformation as both a subject and a setting for artistic intervention.
Born in 1912 in Damanhour, Kamal joined the Ministry of Public Works in 1962, played a role in overseeing the construction of the High Dam during the 1960s, and served as Egypt’s Minister of Irrigation from 1974 to 1975. The Valley of Walls alludes to his archives, technical, bureaucratic, and personal, not through traditional display, but through subtle, at times disorienting gestures embedded in the space itself.
The exhibition brought together four artists: Kamal’s granddaughter, painter Nada Baraka; architect Mohamed al-Maghraby; and visual artists Hany Rashed and Malak Yacout. Although distinct in style and medium, each artist engaged Kamal’s archival legacy and the apartment’s layered presence in their own way, treating the space as a collaborator rather than a backdrop.
Stripped of any signs of renovation, the apartment may at first feel familiar. But through the artists’ interventions, it becomes unfamiliar terrain, each room a puzzle, each object a fragment. The crumbling walls both divide and connect these spaces, forming a kind of spatial labyrinth filled with clues, contradictions, and unresolved narratives.
At the heart of the apartment is a central room featuring a wooden cabinet that hints at the themes of the exhibition. Inside are photographs of Kamal, architectural sketches, personal letters, postcards, and books, a constellation of items that suggests rather than defines the contours of his life and work. This room reveals that the exhibition is not limited to Kamal’s political and technical role; it also gestures toward his interests in Africa, ethics, and philosophy.
Malak Yacout explores the fictional and fragmented nature of archival interpretation. In one room, she engraved lines from a technical report onto moveable tiles placed across the floor, rearranged daily into nonsensical configurations.
On a nearby wall, she speculates about water infrastructure in Fayoum, posing questions like: How is sewage water distributed? Who decides? These speculative gestures mimic the cryptic language of bureaucratic reports, reminding us that to engage with archives is often to remain an outsider. For Yacout, also trained in anthropology, this alienation is part of the point.
The High Dam, a monumental project Kamal helped oversee, looms in the background, too vast to be ignored, too dominant to be fully engaged with. Mohamed al-Maghraby addresses this dilemma through three works. The first, Phantasmagoria, is an augmented reality rendering of the dam, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea of illusion and dream imagery. The second is a video installation in which diagrams of the dam continuously morph across three screens. The third, a conventional sketch of a dam, is displayed in a museum-like vitrine, complete with a moving magnifying glass that simultaneously reveals and obscures.
That same cabinet also has a personal history. It was used by Kamal in his later years as his eyesight deteriorated. Maghraby adapted the piece for the exhibition, giving it a new function while retaining its original presence. This quiet transformation, functional, aesthetic, intimate, echoes throughout the show.
Nada Baraka’s abstract paintings appear in stacked batches, echoing the visual logic of an archive. Elsewhere, found artworks from the apartment are arranged in an installation reminiscent of a cabinet d’amateur. In a damaged bathroom, tiny laborer figurines animate the idea of a stalled or failed infrastructure project. Kitchen jars are filled with labeled minerals, each label carrying not only scientific but philosophical significance. A recorded technical report, narrated by Yacout’s grandfather, plays in the background, layered with strange, unidentifiable sounds.
The kitchen, ordinarily a domestic anchor, is transformed into an uncanny space filled with incomplete sketches and dislocated tools.
A bed flipped on its side becomes a metaphor for the work of archival sorting and reassembly. One room remains locked, a silent acknowledgment of what cannot be accessed or known.
The curatorial decision to treat the apartment as a co-author of the show is not only spatial, it is ethical. For Youssef, working with the space rather than merely occupying it was essential. “Befriending the space, collaborating with the apartment rather than using it simply as an exhibition venue… That ethical consideration allowed the artworks to exist humbly in the space, as the practice of this project was that of listening.”
Ultimately, the exhibition insists on respecting what remains unknown. If archives and museums are typically associated with authority and the pursuit of factual truth, The Valley of Walls offers a counter-approach: an ethics of uncertainty. Here, not knowing becomes a valid and even necessary mode of engagement. The artworks inhabit the apartment not to explain Kamal’s life or legacy, but to complicate it — to allow for silences, misreadings, and open-ended questions.
This spirit of openness even extended to the accidental. During the exhibition’s installation, a pigeon entered through a broken window and made its nest in the bathroom sink. Rather than remove it, the artists welcomed the pigeon’s presence, allowing this uninvited guest to remain. The nest became another part of the space’s living archive — a quiet, surreal detail that added to the apartment’s layered reality and further deepened the show’s embrace of the unpredictable.
The Valley of Walls lives on through recorded tours available on Apexart, the platform that supported the exhibition. In refusing certainty and prioritizing the integrity of place, the exhibition leaves visitors with an experience that resists easy closure. It opens up the archive not just as a collection of materials, but as a site of imaginative reassembly where memory, absence, bureaucracy, and intimacy all coexist.
Text Reference Farida Youssed and an Article by Yasmine Moataz Ahmed titled Making the familiar strange
Photography by Egyptian architectural and documentary photographers Georges & Samuel (The GS Studio)
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