Studio ghosts: or did Nauman have a studio at Gertrude Contemporary?, Two-channel video and sound, CRT TVs and Speakers, 2024–2025.

Presented in the group exhibition Séance @gallerygalleryinc from 6 Nov to 28 Nov. The work was previously shown as a multichannel installation in a one-night solo exhibition at @working_at_heights_ , hosted by Artery Cooperative, on 21 March 2025.

Referencing Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), I set up cameras in various locations inside Gertrude Contemporary at night while preparing to move out of my studio in 2024. Continuing my ongoing exploration of the invisible body within photographic and moving-image practices, I made myself invisible from the space while the cameras recorded.
The work draws on Egyptian films Sirr Taqiyyat Al-Ikhfa (The Secret of the Invisible Hat), ‘Ad Li Yantaqim (Back for Revenge), and Egyptian films about the prophet Mohamed, which I previously appropriated in In Search of Mohamed.

Installation shots of the group exhibition Séance @gallerygalleryinc.

Séance presents a dialogue between different artistic practices that engage with invisibility, elevation, and the body’s withdrawal. Through this conversation, it explores the unseen as a generative presence — an unstable site where memory, spirit, and image intersect. 
The exhibition concept is inspired by early photographic experiments that sought to capture what exists beyond the limits of perception. Drawing on the history of séance photography and Georges Méliès’ pioneering cinematic illusions — such as The Vanishing Lady (1896) and The Man with the Rubber Head (1901) — the exhibition brings together works that use tricks, manipulations, and strategies of staging to suggest the presence of what cannot be seen.

List of works:

Harry McAlpine
I Like Technology and Technology Likes Me #2
Charcoal on cotton mat, framed in hand-stained Tasmanian oak and Perspex, 100 × 80 cm, 2023

Parker Lev Dupain
I’m starting to look like my father
Sawdust, milk, 95.5 × 33 cm each, 2024

Georgie Mattingley
Ascension I, II
Hand-tinted silver gelatin prints, 25 x 18 cm each, 2017

Ravi Avasti
One For John
Iron filings, magnets, custom electronics, 96 × 33.3 × 33.5 cm, 2018

Alex Meagher
Bleach study #2
4×5 positive film, lightbox, 2018

Ezz Monem
Studio ghosts: or did Nauman have a studio at Gertrude Contemporary?
Two-channel video and sound, CRT TVs, 2024–2025

Curated by Ezz Monem.

@raviavasti@parkerlevdupain@harrymcalpine@alex_marms@georgmat@ezzmonem@gallerygalleryinc

It was lovely to have one of my older works included in the group show ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. It opened last night at @v_i_s_u_a_l_d_i_a_r_y and is open until 30 November.

Thanks @camille_chapman and the Visual Diary artists’ collective for inviting me to be part of the show.

Showing ‘Cow without a head’, print on fabric, 248cmX195cm.

Thanks to everyone who came to the opening of the exhibition, to the artists who were part of it, and to the team at @gallerygalleryinc for making it happen.

The exhibition Séance opens tomorrow, Thursday 6 November 2025, 6–8 pm⁠ @gallerygalleryinc 
📍 Level 1, 7A Hope St (entrance on Ovens St), Brunswick VIC 3056
$10 entry — all proceeds go toward supporting the gallery.
Free drinks 🥂

Séance presents a dialogue between different artistic practices that engage with invisibility, elevation, and the body’s withdrawal. Through this conversation, it explores the unseen as a generative presence — an unstable site where memory, spirit, and image intersect. 
The exhibition concept is inspired by early photographic experiments that sought to capture what exists beyond the limits of perception. Drawing on the history of séance photography and Georges Méliès’ pioneering cinematic illusions — such as The Vanishing Lady (1896) and The Man with the Rubber Head (1901) — the exhibition brings together works that use tricks, manipulations, and strategies of staging to suggest the presence of what cannot be seen.

Artists:
Ravi Avasti
Parker Lev Dupain
Harry McAlpine
Alex Meagher
Georgie Mattingley
Ezz Monem

Thanks to Josh and Laine for inviting me to curate this show, and to @countercoulter and @pandy.a for loaning us Georgie’s work for the exhibition.

@raviavasti@parkerlevdupain@harrymcalpine@alex_marms@georgmat@ezzmonem@gallerygalleryinc

GalleryGalleryINC is very proud to present : Séance– a dialogue between different artistic practices that engage with invisibility, elevation, and the body’s withdrawal. Through this conversation, it explores the unseen as a generative presence — an unstable site where memory, spirit, and image intersect.
The exhibition concept is inspired by early photographic experiments that sought to capture what exists beyond the limits of perception. Drawing on the history of séance photography and Georges Méliès’ pioneering cinematic illusions — such as The Vanishing Lady (1896) and The Man with the Rubber Head (1901) — the exhibition brings together works that use tricks, manipulations, and strategies of staging to suggest the presence of what cannot be seen.

Artists:
Ravi Avasti
Parker Lev Dupain
Harry McAlpine
Alex Meagher
Georgie Mattingley
Ezz Monem

Curated by Ezz Monem

Opening Event: Thursday 6 Nov 2025, 6-8 pm⁠
GalleryGallery INC.
Level 1, 7A Hope St (entrance on Ovens St), Brunswick VIC 3056
$10 entry — all proceeds go toward supporting the gallery
Opening hours: Saturdays (10am-4pm) & by appointment
Last day: Saturday, 29 November.

@raviavasti@parkerlevdupain@harrymcalpine@alex_marms@georgmat@ezzmonem@gallerygalleryinc

Harry McAlpine is represented by CHALK HORSE @chalkhorsegallery
Ezz Monem is represented by THIS IS NO FANTASY @thisisnofantasy

Image credit: ASCENSION II — work by Georgie Mattingley, photographed with the assistance of Guillaume Savy, Hand-tinted silver gelatin print, 2017.

It’s been so nice to see a small photo of one of my old works included in the installation Mnemosyne Chaos Archive, as part of the exhibition Of Stadiums and Construction Sites (Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent) at Gertrude Contemporary. Thanks @lisrad —such a great project!

The photos are from 2012, when I was printing the work in my studio in Cairo, and from 2018 at the VCA with a second edition print. The prints, Vinegar..Soldier..Coke, were made in response to the Friday of Anger—the first wave of protests in the Egyptian revolution of 2011.

Today on Radio Alhara @radioalhara! An excerpt from my set at the fundraiser event The Time That Remains 2.0 in Naarm at @unassigned_gallery will be featured as part of a three-hour broadcast, alongside a group of amazing musicians who played live music that night.

Organised by @itsmadeinpalestine.
Tune in with hosts @georgiaamulholland and @luqman.music
Friday, June 20
7–10pm Naarm time
12–3pm Bethlehem time
Broadcasting via @radioalhara

Thanks @georgiaamulholland and @luqman.music for organizing this!
Videos from @marwa.a.abdallah

In the set: I did some mashups of tracks by Shoubra El General, Hassan Abou Alam, George Wassouf, Maryam Saleh, Teqmum, L.F.T, and Molotof.

Last day to see the finalist exhibition of the 2025 Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Art @montsalvatartscentre.
‘And He Said: This is Power?, Do you need to eat wasabi to get emotional?’, 2022/2024 35mm slides, Kodak Ektapro slide projector, motion sensor, timber and metal structures.

Two of my works from the series ‘In Search of Mohamed: Archive of Opening Credits’ were included in the group exhibition NOFANTASY25, which ran from 8 Feb – 29 Mar at @thisisnofantasy.

Archive of Opening Credits #1: Thawrat Al-Madina (Revolution of the City), 2022, Archival Pigment Print, Ed. of 5 + 1AP, 70 × 92.5 cm, framed.

Archive of Opening Credits #8: Eisharit Morour (Traffic Light), 2021, Archival Pigment Print, Ed. of 5 + 1AP, 70 × 92.5 cm, framed.

Photography: @simonjstrong

EZZ MONEM – in Never Keep Both Feet on the Ground. Closing day today! The gallery is open to 5pm⚡️

Ezz Monem’s work Revolutionary failure (2021) was made in response to the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. Monem revisited the images he had made during the eighteen days of protest in Cairo in 2011. A selection of these images were rephotographed, with an acid used to erase the emulsion from the film surface, before the photograph was manually developed. The resulting images were located between rephotographs and deliberate erasures.

“The images mark the passing of the revolution from lived experience into the realm of historical event. They reflect a process of remembering paired with an attempt to forget. My generation rose up to transform our greatest frustrations into our highest hopes. As we met our limits and witnessed the catastrophe that followed, the uprising became our greatest disappointment.” – Ezz Monem

@ezzmonem

📷: EZZ MONEM
Revolutionary Failure, 2021
Archival pigment print, Tasmanian oak frame
29 x 41 cm each
Edition of 5 + 2AP

Ezz Monem appears courtesy @thisisnofantasy

#ezzmonem#revolutionaryfailure#neverkeepbothfeetontheground#sarahscoutpresents#47ES

Last days of the group exhibition Never Keep Both Feet on the Ground at @sarahscoutpresents. The exhibition closes this Saturday 10 May.

I’m showing my photographic series ‘Revolutionary Failure’, 2021, along with this group of amazing artists:
Andrea Eckersley, Veronica Kent, Aylsa McHugh, Elena Misso, Mardi Nowak, Jake Preval, Sally Smart, David Hugh Thomas

Check out the available works at the gallery’s Viewing Room: https://bit.ly/3GZaSw7

Never Keep Both Feet on the Ground, brings together nine Melbourne-based artists whose works engage with expanded collage and assemblage.

The exhibition is titled after a work by the German Dada artist Hannah Höch; best known as a pioneer of photomontage and one of the first artists to engage with and understand the potency of images in the printed mass media. Höch’s role working for the German publishing house Ullstein Verlag provided her with unfettered access to magazines and newspapers, which she cut up and reassembled, drawing on her understanding of cinematic techniques, to both comment on and critique contemporary events and the social construction of gender roles.

While a number of the artists featured in Never Keep Both Feet on the Ground engage explicitly with the assemblage techniques favoured by Höch – including her interest in reassembling bodies to unsettling affect – others use strategies of erasure, folding, and layering in their construction of works that celebrate how an image loosened from its original moorings and set adrift can reveal new truths.

Installation views,
Sarah Scout Presents, April 2025
Photograph: Nicholas Mahady

Video: @ingmar_apinis

@sarahscoutpresents
@thisisnofantasy

Film stills from ‘And He Said: This is Power?, Golden Eagle’ and footage of making holes on the 16mm film.

Golden Eagle is a two-channel video installation presents a close-up of the republican eagle as it flaps on an Egyptian flag. A long-standing symbol of power in Egypt, the eagle has appeared in devotional and political iconography from the Ancient Egyptian era to the present. Today, it also functions as a stamp of legitimacy on official government documents, underscoring its role as a marker of authority and national identity.

One channel shows the eagle flapping rapidly, transformed into 16mm film. In a durational performative intervention, a Japanese punch tool—resembling a stamp—was used to meticulously punch out the eagle in each frame of the film. This laborious process, carried out over nearly four hours, enacts a symbolic erasure through repetition, becoming both physically and conceptually exhaustive.

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

‘Session 6, March 6, 2024’. A show based around readings of Alain Badiou.
The exhibition is open at Artspace @vcaartspace until Sunday, 4 May, from 11am to 5pm.

The Problem Images reading group, Adam Gottlieb, Oliver Henry, Kate Jones and Lisa Radford, together with invited artists James Lynch, Mohamed Ezz Monem, Josh Dalka, Parker Lev Dupain, Beau Emmett, Andrea Illés + Grace Marlow, Lauren Dunn, Lou Hubbard, Samm Sutton, Matthew Lane, A Constructed World with Clemence de Montgolfier to participate in the exhibtion

Josh Dalka, @blow.emit, Samm Sutton, @dunnlauren, Matthew Lane, @lou_hubbard_art, @adamgottlieb_, @lisrad, @parkerlevdupain, @_kate_j_jones_, @ezzmonem, @oxoxohenry, @_purple_stars_expleting_ + Grace Marlow, James Lynch

VCA Artspace
38 Dodds Street Southbank.
April 29th – 4th May 2025

You are invited to the opening of the exhibition Session 6, March 6, 2024 on Tuesday April 29th, 2025 between 5 and 7 pm at VCA Artspace @vcaartspace, 38 Dodds Street Southbank. The exhibition runs April 29th – 4th May, 2025 and is open between 11am – 5pm.

The Problem Images reading group, Adam Gottlieb, Oliver Henry, Kate Jones and Lisa Radford, together invited artists James Lynch, Mohamed Ezz Monem, Josh Dalka, Parker Lev Dupain, Beau Emmett, Andrea Illés + Grace Marlow, Lauren Dunn, Lou Hubbard, Samm Sutton, Matthew Lane, A Constructed World with Clemence de Montgolfier to participate in the exhibtion.

Session 6, March 6, 2024.
VCA Artspace
38 Dodds Street Southbank.
April 29th – 4th May 2025

Thanks to @lisrad and Kate Jones.

Documentation from my recent one night exhibition at @working_at_heights_, 21/03/2025.

‘Studio ghosts: Or did Nauman have a studio at Gertrude Contemporary?’, 2024/2025
Multi-channel CRT TV installation and soundscape.

“During a residency at Gertrude Contemporary, an artist discovered a set of video tapes in the basement labeled Nauman. Intrigued, he played them on an old Handycam he had as a teenager. The footage appeared to be CCTV-like recordings of Gertrude’s interior spaces, including his own studio, where nothing significant seemed to happen. But as he kept watching, an unsettling phenomenon emerged”.

Referencing Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), I set up cameras in various locations inside Gertrude Contemporary at night while preparing to move out of the studio. Continuing my ongoing exploration of the representation of the invisible body in photographic and moving image mediums, I made myself invisible in the gallery space while the cameras were filming.
The work draws on Egyptian films like Sirr Taqiyyat Al-Ikhfa (The Secret of the Invisible Hat), ‘Ad Li Yantaqim (Back for Revenge), as well as Egyptian films about the prophet Mohamed, which I previously appropriated in In Search of Mohamed.

Thanks to @timwdwd for the opportunity to test new ideas and for helping with the install. Big thanks to Andrew Cherry for digitising the video tape at the last minute.
Appreciate @aymankaake@ianbunyi__ for lending me equipment, and @brigitryan for helping fix the media players before the opening.

@working_at_heights_
@arterycooperative
@thisisnofantasy
@gertrudecontemporary 👻

Photography by Kenneth Suico
@kenneth_suico

I’m pleased to have one of my works included in this group show alongside a lineup of amazing artists, opening this Saturday from 3 to 5 PM.

#Repost@sarahscoutpresents
・・・
UPCOMING – Never Keep Both Feet on the Ground, brings together nine Melbourne-based artists whose works engage with expanded collage and assemblage.

The exhibition is titled after a work by the German Dada artist Hannah Höch; best known as a pioneer of photomontage and one of the first artists to engage with and understand the potency of images in the printed mass media. Höch’s role working for the German publishing house Ullstein Verlag provided her with unfettered access to magazines and newspapers, which she cut up and reassembled, drawing on her understanding of cinematic techniques, to both comment on and critique contemporary events and the social construction of gender roles.

While a number of the artists featured in Never Keep Both Feet on the Ground engage explicitly with the assemblage techniques favoured by Höch – including her interest in reassembling bodies to unsettling affect – others use strategies of erasure, folding, and layering in their construction of works that celebrate how an image loosened from its original moorings and set adrift can reveal new truths.

Exhibition dates: 28 March to 10 May

Ezz Monem appears courtesy of THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne
– @thisisnofantasy
David H Thomas appears courtesy of William Mora Galleries, Melbourne – @wmoragalleries

#neverkeepbothfeetontheground#collage#assemblage#sarahscoutpresents#47ES

I’m doing a one night show at @working_at_heights_ this Friday, 21 March, 7-9 pm, 107 Helen Street, Northcote.

‘Studio ghosts: Or did Nauman have a studio at Gertrude Contemporary?’

During a residency at Gertrude Contemporary, an artist discovered a set of video tapes in the basement labeled Nauman. Intrigued, he played them on an old Handycam he had as a teenager. The footage appeared to be CCTV-like recordings of Gertrude’s interior spaces, including his own studio, where nothing significant seemed to happen. But as he kept watching, an unsettling phenomenon emerged.

Multi-channel video and sound installation.

WAH is supported by Artery Cooperative and City of Darebin.

@thisisnofantasy
@arterycooperative
@darebin_arts

#Repost @working_at_heights_

We’re excited to share details of our next event, a one night multi-channel video and sound installation by Ezz Monem.

‘Studio ghosts: Or did Nauman have a studio at Gertrude Contemporary?’

Friday 21 March
7-9 pm
107 Helen Street, Northcote

During a residency at Gertrude Contemporary, an artist discovered a set of video tapes in the basement labeled Nauman. Intrigued, he played them on an old Handycam he had as a teenager. The footage appeared to be CCTV-like recordings of Gertrude’s interior spaces, including his own studio, where nothing significant seemed to happen. But as he kept watching, an unsettling phenomenon emerged.

Referencing Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), Ezz Monem set up cameras in various locations inside Gertrude Contemporary at night while he was preparing to move out of the studio. Continuing his ongoing exploration of the representation of the invisible body in photographic and moving image mediums, he made himself invisible in the gallery space while the cameras were filming.

The work draws on Egyptian films Sirr Taqiyyat Al-Ikhfa (The Secret of the Invisible Hat), ‘Ad Li Yantaqim (Back for Revenge), as well as Egyptian films about the prophet Mohamed, which the artist previously appropriated in In Search of Mohamed.

Ezz Monem is represented by This Is No Fantasy.

WAH is supported by Artery Cooperative and City of Darebin.

@ezzmonem
@thisisnofantasy
@arterycooperative
@darebin_arts

I’m pleased that my work And He Said: This is Power?, Do you need to eat wasabi to get emotional?, 2022/2024, has been shortlisted for the 2025 Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Art and will be exhibited at Montsalvat from 4 April to 25 May. @nillumbikarts

And He Said: This is Power?, Do you need to eat wasabi to get emotional?, 2022/2024 80 35mm slides, Kodak Ektapro slide projector. A photography session in a Cairo bodybuilding gym captures Egyptian men performing traditional bodybuilding poses, then captures their expressions as they taste wasabi for the first time. As their peers watched, a dynamic of peer pressure emerged. Many men tried to hide their reactions during the shoot, revealing their true discomfort only after the camera’s gaze had shifted away. The work explores the tension between the display of power and the urge to hide vulnerability.

The work is part of the project And He Said: This is Power?, which explores the complex dynamics of authority, control and emotional expression. The project brings together video installations and photographic works in which the artist investigates manifestations of power in both personal and societal contexts, framed by the interplay between individual identity and nationhood. 

The installation was exhibited as part of my solo exhibition at Gertrude Glasshouse last year. @gertrudecontemporary

Production support: Ahmed Lesi and Mahmoud Bakar. Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Naarm Melbourne. @thisisnofantasy

Installation photos: Christian Capurro.