‘Deceiving Time’ - Exhibition catalogue essay by Sara Sarofim

No notion has and continues to fascinate Ahmad Abdalla (b.1978, Egypt) as much as the concept of time, its passage and fleetance. Although having trained as a classical musician and worked as a film editor for a decade before turning to film directing, photography and collecting cameras have always been a passion of his. With a hard drive filled with over one hundred thousand photographs and boxes full of negatives, Abdalla has had a habit of sifting through his old pictures every now and then, skimming through his documentation of events and spaces.

What started as a tendency to wait a month between taking a picture and looking at it–a sort of buffer between an event and its recollection–became an itch to understand the hierarchy we give to images in accordance with remembrance. What makes an image fit for permanence? An aspiring recollection or an anticipated desire to preserve how a moment is lived, felt and embodied? What happens to the photographs that don’t make the cut? Finding handfuls of pictures that almost look the same, Abdalla tended to anomalies in seeming repetitions. In this body of work, Deceiving Time, Abdalla dives back in his archive of photographs taken between 2010 and 2021, and overlays variations of the same image to explore–and complicate–how we recollect and remember.

Each print is made up of overlays of disregarded photographs, ranging from four to fifteen layers of superimpositions, some taken seconds apart and some taken minutes apart, from different angles and with different subjects. Abdalla lays out disregarded photographs of a moment together–whether the landscape of Cairo at night or someone weaving in El Hussein or Mouled El Naby celebrations–on screen, as a strip and fragmentation of a specific recollection. He takes the time to notice the subtle differences: a subject looking away, gazing back at the camera or perhaps someone walking into the frame accidentally. Using digital software, he starts to play with different transparencies, fading some images out, bringing some to the forefront, mimicking how memory and remembrance often play out. With the vibrancy of the colours and jittery lines, the prints are at times dizzying. The eye grips on lines and layers to make sense of the image, only to end up in a whirlwind of motion. Yet the prints are far from motion, they show time sitting still, with still images merged together. This laborious process requires Abdalla to force himself to stop editing and reject the goal of a perfect image, instead indulging in the convoluted nature of recollection.

The works echo the environment they are taken in. Full of lines, movements and haziness, they feel auditive–as if allowing one to tap into the soundscapes captured. They also bear witness to ghostly movements and trails of passages that go unnoticed in unyielding circadian rhythms. Standing as documentation of a multiple of nodes and frequencies, Abdalla’s work allows spaces to be agents themselves–absorbing, looking and hoarding.

How to grasp time, handle it and deceive it are all questions that come up in Abdalla’s image- making practice, both still and moving. With a background in music and film editing, especially from 1999 onwards with the beginnings of the shift to digital cinema, he has always encountered the notion of time. Having directed a string of highly acclaimed independent films and participated in international film festivals in Cairo, London, Toronto and more [Heliopolis (2009), Microphone (2010), Rags & Tatters (2013), Decor (2014), Exterior/Night (2018)] he has often had one of the lead characters carrying a camera recorder or a phone to document scenes happening in the film, a reference to the act of making and documenting.

The tradition of photography and filmmaking seeping into each other isn’t new. American director Stanley Kubrick started out in photography before venturing into filmmaking as did artist Man Ray, who along with being an avant-garde photographer in the 1920s and 1930s, worked on a number of films. Regionally, the work of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkish photographer, cinematographer, screenwriter, actor and film director, best known for his Palme d'Or winning film Winter Sleep (2014), has also inspired Abdalla’s photographs. They seem to tread the line between visual references of both long exposure work and chronophotography, a technique involving taking a series of still pictures over a predetermined amount of time, like modern-day bursts photographs, to capture phases of a movement.

Additionally, reminiscent of pioneering English photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s works, documentation of movements are grouped together, but here layered, all conjuring into one scene, devoid of hierarchies and deceiving chronology. Taking the multiplicity of lines found in long exposure works and its potential to prolong time, Abdalla merges it with the essence of chronophotography, the attentiveness to small movements and changes, to create a collision of instances.

Revisiting images formerly put away is an exploration of everything that laid outside of the image chosen to encapsulate a memory, once deemed superior. It is an attentive act of looking and a patient process of recalling. In a digital age where exhibiting photographs often takes place in twenty-four hour windows and single image format, thinking about the lives that images live–or don’t–is part of considering how and what we will remember. The exhibition displays singular unisons of moments that toy with our vision and celebrate subtleties, multiples and recollecting. Ahmad Abdalla gathers idiosyncratic markings of time, working with and against each other–a visual crescendo of zaman.

Sarah Sarofim

Cairo, January 2022

Sarah Sarofim (b.1998, Egypt) is a visual artist and writer based between Cairo and Toronto. She holds a BA in Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. Her projects often begin with sociolinguistics and draw from archival images and public space to investigate notions of gaze, performance and erasure. Sarofim’s work has been exhibited in Cairo, Toronto, Houston and New York and published in Canadian Art Magazine, Photo ED Magazine and i-D. Her writings on art have appeared in Canadian Art Magazine and other publications.