Rana Elnemr · A Chapter of Synonyms

drawing from a series of photographs, videos and notes taken in cairo, the city in which rana elnemr lives, this show connects some of the main urban changes of recent years with the idea of architecture as a double projection. architecture represents a ‘project’ of building, but it is also a projection in the sense of an imaginary exchange: a dialogue between space and ‘images’. rana elnemr notes that architectural photography often augments two-dimensionality, thereby increasing the space in which one is not able to live. in this exhibition, the artist deals with this issue practically by associating photographs, films, and texts in a conversation between fragments where incompleteness resides and makes sense. the images and meanings that are commonly generated about constructed spaces are supposed to play the roles of ‘synonyms’, and rana elnemr works at disturbing these dynamics. her images introduce deliberate pauses in the visual discourse on architecture: short observations, texts or anything that remind us that no image is visible without knowledge, be it information or memory. other disruptions – like a sculpture or a shadow – can enlarge the exchanges between the visual and the knowledgeable, informing and contributing to the development of a project that had begun with assembled in streams of synonyms, a show held in cairo’s sharjah art gallery in 2014-15.