Cross_Over_01 - Limited Edition of 10 Print

I am an Egyptian/British artist living and working in the UK.These ideas that are central to my work are of my own experiences and observations that I accumulated throughout my living memory. My mothers ways of using everything and her abilities to make use of anything more than one time, me wearing my older sisters clothes, as she made use of them over and over again. My fathers doggedness and stubbornness when he tried to fix any and every thing, making things from nothing and creating hardship for himself and every one surrounding him.I also draw on my days at school and university in Cairo, my move to Sinai, working there and crossing the checkpoints that are all over the place, crossing the borders of Egypt for the first time in 1994 to Germany and my unforgettable time in western Europe, the people that I met on my way and the experiences. The conflict between the Eastern and Western values.Value is one of the most important issues that I dealt with in the past and am still dealing with, the way we see things and use them, how we follow fashion and change our position according to it, how we consume and discard, how we look at things and put a price on them. I made works in 2001, 2002 and 2003 that try to deal with the issue of value and valuation, but those works were also considering aesthetics and the relationship between the work and the viewer, engulfment, alienation and dislocation within a specific context.As my knowledge from the time I lived in Egypt form the greatest chunk of my visual and social archive, many of my ideas nowadays come from my current surroundings, namely London, UK, where I now live. Having said that, I think of London as a place where a great deal of information from many places are communicated, and an example of that is the great wealth of information about the Middle East that is available to whoever wants to know.I have in the last few years been developing ideas and works, that deal with many issues such as inclusion and exclusion, borders, crossings, inside and outside, far and close, entrapment, tightness and comfort, space, see-through walls and the world of the in-between.About the work Special Place II,Special place II, London, June 2008-06-24In special place II I created a work that had three elements, a structure, a bureaucratic system and a performance element.