Current Exhibition

Quiet Dwellings - a duo show of Huda Lutfi and Bernard Guillot - 9th April - 7th May, 2025

Tintera is pleased to present Quiet Dwellings, an exhibition that brings together the work of two of our artists: Egyptian artist Huda Lutfi and the late French artist Bernard Guillot and curated by Lamees Abdelaziz During Guillot’s years in Cairo (1973-2021), he and Lutfi formed a close friendship, often engaging in conversations that subtly informed each other’s practice. On display are 18 silver gelatin and hand painted photographs by Guillot placed alongside 15 paintings, and a video by Lutfi in which we see both artists constructing spaces that oscillate between the intimate and the peculiar, evoking a search for stillness and a contemplation of what it means to retreat inward.

Lutfi’s paintings depict spectral figures in sparse interiors, her figures resting between states of presence and absence, while Guillot, in his photographs, navigates spaces that alternate between the tangible and ethereal, real and surreal. The artists treat their subjects—rooms, cemeteries, figures in procession, and self-portraits—as sites of reflection and transformation. Guillot’s photographs resist the documentary impulse of the medium, instead transforming familiar spaces into surreal landscapes, while Lutfi’s paintings render the home as an ambiguous realm—at times a sanctuary, at others a site of estrangement. Quiet Dwellings invites us to sit with silence in their works—to dwell in close yet strange spaces where time stretches and solitude becomes a mode of contemplation.

Bernard Guillot (1950-2021) was a French artist who predominantly worked in painting and photography. A graduate of the l’école nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, Guillot received the Prix Nadar in 2003 for his photo book Pavillion Blanc (The White House). His works are in many private and public collections including: the Centre Pompidou, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the American University in Cairo amongst others. Guillot divided his time between France and Egypt.

Huda Lutfi (b. Cairo, 1947) is a cultural and gender historian whose work in the field of the visual arts translates these affiliations in multiple, complex ways. She received her PhD in Arab Muslim Cultural History from McGill University and began her practice during the mid-1990s as a self-trained artist. In 2012, a self-titled monograph on Huda Lutfi was published by The Third Line. Her work has been shown widely in local and international institutions, and is part of major collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Marguerite Hoffman Art Collection, among others.

Lamees Abdelaziz (b. Kuwait, 1998) is an Egyptian curator and artist. Her work explores personal and intergenerational narratives within the domestic sphere, reflecting on the act of making work as a form of repair. She holds an M.A. in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, having received the Mahy Khalifa Art Scholarship in 2021, and a B.A. in Visual Arts from The American University in Cairo. Abdelaziz has curated projects in several institutions across Cairo, including SOMA Art Gallery and AUC Tahrir Cultural Center, and is currently lecturing in Visual Cultures at The American University in Cairo.