Installation shots for the billboards at @incinerator_gallery, showing until 19 January.
Photos by Gianna Rizzo @meaty
Thanks to @mjflamiano and @jakeadamtreacy
Text from the gallery website:
This iteration of Ezz Monem’s photographic series is displayed as three large-scale billboards at Incinerator Gallery, exploring authority, surveillance, and tourism through the juxtaposition of the Egyptian Pyramids and the figure of an anonymous local policeman.
In 2014, Google Street View technology expanded to document some historic locations in Egypt, including the Pyramids. A policeman accompanied the Google Street View team during this process, resulting in his unexpected appearance in the online images. Ezz edited these photographs to remove other spectators, leaving the lone policeman as the sole figure representing authority. The figure of the policeman is both mundane and familiar; he traverses the landscape and stares back at the camera as a portrait subject. These photographs invert the usual order of authority in Egypt, where citizens are under constant surveillance in public spaces and online. Here, the viewer assumes a panoptic role, engaging in counter-surveillance where the watcher is, in turn, watched.
Reflecting on the original iteration of the series, Ezz explains,“I turned these images into postcards and hand-delivered them to friends in Egypt. Printed manually on silver gelatin paper, and then hand-coloured with oil paints, the images allude to vintage postcards of the Pyramids. I asked those who received a postcard to write on the back about their relation to Egypt as home and authority and return the postcard without an envelope. I asked them to document the card before it was put in the Egyptian post, which could intercept it because of its contents. And, because Australia prohibited the entrance of letters and postcards delivered by post from Egypt at that time, returns were redirected to Berlin.”
