| Coming from a multidisciplinary background involving landscape architecture, fine arts, and theory, I work in an interdisciplinary style involving photography and installation. Identity and “land” or “landscape as subject,” and the territory where various idea battles are fought have been the primary aspects of my work. The series Genius Loci (2003, Egypt) is an investigation from pure landscape progressively to pure urbanscape and attempts to address theory-based concepts about land and land use, how these concepts are grafted on to sites. In Roman mythology a “genius loci” was the protective spirit of a place. In contemporary usage, it usually refers to a location’s distinctive atmosphere, or a sense of place. Both series are installations, as if one is reading a text, meaning there are chapters, a beginning, and an end. |  |
Heba Farid
Coming from a multidisciplinary background involving landscape architecture, fine arts, and theory, I work in an interdisciplinary style involving photography and installation. Identity and “land” or “landscape as subject,” and the territory where various idea battles are fought have been the primary aspects of my work.
The series Genius Loci (2003, Egypt) is an investigation from pure landscape progressively to pure urbanscape and attempts to address theory-based concepts about land and land use, how these concepts are grafted on to sites. In Roman mythology a “genius loci” was the protective spirit of a place. In contemporary usage, it usually refers to a location’s distinctive atmosphere, or a sense of place. Both series are installations, as if one is reading a text, meaning there are chapters, a beginning, and an end.
The Amid Basalt Strategies (2005, Turkey) series of photographs investigates the wall and the bridge, two opposite architectural forms, one separating and the other connecting, one begins to see how settlements are planned and built to include or exclude populations. “Amid” is the ancient name for Diyarbakir, southwestern Turkey, which hosts evidences of human habitation over many centuries, always reacting to political forces.
The installation Atlas of a Genealogy (2005), maps the notion of “Occidentalism,” meaning the conventional perspective of the West as other or separate from the identity of the East. The notion does not exist in this age of mass migration, where identity becomes a highly personalized, deliberate creation, checking and re-checking itself, a state of being that cyclically renegotiates current socio-geopolitical events, vacillating across vast areas of a cultural map. Part I—Port of Entry, is a digitalized projection of original multi-format slide material, somewhat autobiographical, spanning ten years, the late 60s and early 70s, and about U.S.A., Canada and Egypt. Part II—Salamat and News, is a compilation of sound material gathered from original one-fourth-inch reel tapes and cassettes representing the “oral letters” sent between family members, spanning eight years within the same time period, from Egypt, U.S.A., and Canada. The 1967 voice recording contains all the hopes expressed for the success of the new “emigrant” family to the U.S.A. The music section contains a selection of then popular musical tastes from Egypt (Umm Kulthumm, Abdel Halim Hafez, Egyptian folk music, and the soundtrack of an Indian film) and North America (Patsy Cline, the Beatles, several Motown hits, and “light” music).
Currently I am working with photographic archives, and focusing on the cross-disciplinary project, Na’ima al-Misriyya (2004-2009), which centers on the life and career of a famous yet forgotten female performer of the early 20th century from the phonograph era of Egyptian-Arabic music.
