Fragment No. 78

My grandfather painted cinema posters in 1960s Alexandria. Giant hand-painted faces for films that played in theatres that no longer exist. When he died, I inherited his studio — his brushes, his pigments, the smell of turpentine soaked into the walls.

I once said: we have the same brush.

I meant it literally. But also not literally at all. What I meant was: the work continues. The hand changes but the impulse doesn’t. Something moves through families, through cities, through objects — if you let it. That’s what I think about when I hold this carpet fragment.

Fragment #78 arrived in Alexandria like most important things arrive here — from somewhere else, carrying a history that doesn’t belong to one place. A 17th-century Caucasian dragon carpet, woven again in Rajasthan, cut in Berlin, now sitting in a studio that used to make movie posters for Egyptian cinema.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s just how culture actually works.

Alexandria has always known this. This city was built on exchange — Greek, Ottoman, French, Italian, Egyptian, all layered on top of each other like paint on a wall. I grew up surrounded by that layering. It’s in the architecture, in the language, in the way people here mix references without thinking about it. My grandfather’s cinema posters were the same — Egyptian stories painted with techniques borrowed from everywhere.

I started painting walls in Alexandria when I was 18. Not because I had a theory about public art. Because the academy was narrow and the street was wide. I wanted my work to exist where people actually lived — not behind a ticket counter.

That was 2008. Since then the work has travelled — Beirut, Stuttgart, Vienna, Milan, Paris, Sharjah. Every wall in a different city is a negotiation: your visual language meeting a place that has its own. You don’t impose. You listen. Then you paint.

A carpet fragment does the same thing. It arrives somewhere and the meaning shifts depending on who’s holding it.

The pattern stays. The story changes.

Last week, Fragment #78 sat on a table next to a stack of signed risograph posters and plates of kebda eskandrani on sourdough toast.

I’d organised a lunch at The Alexandria Deli — a small event where people came to eat, look at art, and talk. The posters were from TOKEN, my solo exhibition at Kodak Passageway in Cairo. Alexandrian liver, dijon mustard, signed prints. No velvet ropes. No press wall. Just the kind of afternoon my grandfather would have recognised: people, food, art, all in the same room with no separation between them.

That’s what Azarita is becoming. Named after the neighbourhood in Alexandria where the studio still stands, it’s my way of turning the practice into infrastructure. Not just painting walls, but curating experiences, building surfaces, creating systems that let the work travel further and last differently. A lunch with kebda and posters is as much a part of it as a mural commission in the Gulf. The point is that the work meets people where they are — whether that’s a wall in Vienna or a deli table in Kafr Abdo.

My grandfather’s posters were commercial objects. They were also art. That was never a contradiction in his studio, and it isn’t one in mine.