Unfolding (2011)
For her series Unfolding, Nermine Hammam combined photographs of the violent actions of the army and police in the year following the 2011 Egyptian Revolution with stylized Japanese landscapes. She printed the series on rice paper, inspired by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese folding screens. She did not make the images of the violence herself, but collected them from civilians who recorded the violence. Because they have been frequently shown in the media, they are immediately recognizable for Egyptians and a symbol of revolutionary ideals. By placing the images in utopian landscapes, the horror only becomes clear at a second glance, as if we were becoming voyeurs of sadism. She thus parodies the human urge to ‘not see’ and questions the power of the mass media.
