Octavio Zaya

Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil observes his life as if he were in a cinema, watching and witnessing every minute of his own movie. As a child, the realization that many of his favorite Egyptian film stars were no longer alive left him with the desire to meet all the actors he loves, before they die or before he dies. In the cinema he has created for himself, he reflects on the flamboyance and fantasies of Egyptian society and movie stars in the cosmopolitan war and pre-revolutionary years in his hometown Cairo. This era is also reflected in his technique of hand-coloring photographs which disrupts our notion of photography by evoking moments of longing, distant in time and place. In his self-portraits, he places himself in liminal scenes that linger between worldly realities and serene dreams, loneliness and fame, sex and death. This is the first comprehensive presentation of Nabil's photographs of artists, his friends, and himself, and images staged over the past fifteen years.

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