Rafik Greiss – The City and the City

Working across film, photography, and sculpture, Egyptian artist Rafik Greiss (b. 1997, IE) considers time not as a linear movement from past to present but as something composed of fragments – moments that accumulate, dissolve, and may unexpectedly resurface as sensation or afterimage. Spanning digital and analog processes, his practice moves between the distant and the proximal at once, reflecting more broadly on transformation, memory, and the shifting states of images and objects. At the center of The City and the City, Greiss's first institutional solo exhibition, is the artist's newly commissioned film of the same title. Conceived as a cinematic essay, the work follows enigmatic figures inhabiting vast desert landscapes, watching and waiting for something that seems yet to happen. Time stretches around the possibility of an event that may never occur, and seemingly empty scenery becomes charged with anticipation. The expectancy of the characters becomes a kind of labor – repeated, prolonged, and without resolution – while vigilance turns into a way of inhabiting territory. The film's soundtrack, composed by musician 7038634357, carries the film's atmosphere beyond the screen and into the exhibition space. Also presented is a series of black-and-white photographs by Greiss, depicting artifacts, objects, and emptied places detached from their original contexts – fragments of sites and events that cannot quite be recovered. Withholding geographical and historical markers, Greiss shifts attention from interpretation toward experience, leaving room for us to shape how the images might be understood. In his oeuvre, memory hovers at the edge of consciousness, shaped by what is seen and half-remembered, suspended between personal recollection and collective history. Curators: Emma Enderby & Liberty Adrien Assistant Curator: Lara Scherrieble The video work The City and the City was co-commissioned by Lo schermo dell'arte, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Kunsthalle Bern, and Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, with the support of the VISIO Production.