Film/video

Xhide - 2020
single channel video, 5 mins
 

Grounded in a particular political context in September-November 2019, this video was first shot as part of creative project during my MA program, and I have since re-filmed it. By refracting the affective experiences of surveillance, collective anxiety, and carceral precarity onto the material space of the home that I share with my partner, this video presents a deliberately partial view of queer life in Cairo through the leaking of pressures and fears from the public sphere into the most private of spaces. While filming it, I constrained myself to compose shots where, even when looking “in” at the home, some element of the “outside” can be seen, heard, or felt in the frame, which is itself a reflection of our carefully navigated visual and aural presences for the sake of my partner's safety. Here, light, sound, shadow, and silence are being constantly negotiated—and are differentially refracted within and without our home—to offer alternative ways of thinking notions of queer presence and absence otherwise to normative narratives of visibility.