And He Said: This is Power?, Golden Eagle, 2024 Two-channel video projection, colour, sound 4 minutes 57 seconds, looped, 16mm film transfer and processing: Ezz Monem, lab: Artist Film Workshop, film scanning: Memory Lab Film. Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Christian Capurro.

Golden Eagle is a two-channel video installation presenting a close-up of the republican eagle as it flaps on an Egyptian flag. The eagle has long symbolised power in Egypt, appearing in devotional and political imagery from Ancient Egypt to the present. It also functions as a stamp of legitimacy on official government documents, reinforcing its relationship to state authority.

One channel shows the eagle flapping rapidly, transferred onto 16mm film. In a performative intervention, I used a screw punch, a tool resembling a stamp, to meticulously punch the eagle out of each individual film frame. Repeated continuously for nearly four hours, the process transforms the removal of a symbol of authority into an exhausting and repetitive physical act. The resulting film carries this erasure materially: the eagle disappears frame by frame, leaving a void where the symbol of power once appeared.

The sound was composed by sampling the instrumental version of the Egyptian national anthem.

Film stills from And He Said: This is Power?, Golden Eagle, 2024.

And He Said: This is Power?, Golden Eagle, 2024 Two-channel video projection, colour, sound 4 minutes 57 seconds, looped. Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Christian Capurro.

 

 

 

 

Film stills from And He Said: This is Power?, Golden Eagle, 2024.

Eagles punched out from the 16mm film.