"I'm going to play with it at home (and feel like a pharaoh)", 2025

The work examines the fictional restitution of Egyptian objects in Europe, confronting colonialism's lasting effects, including the erasure of cultural practices. It also addresses issues like reparations and appropriation of cultural heritage.

"I'm going to play with it at home (and feel like a pharaoh)", 2025

The constant state of disruption on political, cultural, anthropological, social, psychological,

and ecological levels calls for a resilient form of art, one that embraces provocation, fiction,

and illusion.In my current work I am concerned with the social responsibility that we should

have towards each other, within the ecological and social system ruined by power structures,

acts of destruction and war. I delve into themes of fear, anxiety, and migration by examining

narratives from both the past and present.

My work primarily engages with an archaeological approach to storytelling. I dig into my

personal and surrounding environment, recontextualizing non-Western symbols and

images, such as ancient Egyptian motifs, within contemporary frameworks. In my ongoing

project, "I'm going to play with it at home (and feel like a pharaoh)," I 3D-scanned several

objects from Egyptian collections in Germany using photogrammetry techniques. This

project began with "Leaky Archive," a digital initiative by the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum

(RJM) in Cologne, which aims to collaboratively engage with collections in both digital and

analog spaces, making their content and structures more open and polyphonic.

In addition to hidden objects stored in many museum archives, I incorporated artifacts from

the Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst in Munich and the MARKK in Hamburg. By

scanning these objects, I gained the ability to artificially enlarge them and control how much

attention they receive. Through the All-View shot, I symbolically "took" these objects with

me, transforming them into my own property. Alongside the 3D scans, I traveled twice to

Egypt, capturing several black-and-white images with a small-format camera in locations

ranging from Cairo to Sinai.

By fictitiously replacing these 3D objects in various environments, I symbolically return

them to their places of origin. The final work, which involves liquefying ink with watercolor,

emphasizes the fictional nature of this concept, underscoring that it is not a real situation.

The title of the work, a quote from a Disney story set in Egypt, critiques capitalist worldviews

and stereotypes. The colorized images will be framed with engraved quotes and drawings

from these critical children's stories.

The goal is to provoke a discourse on reparations, and to raise questions of belonging,

ownership, colonial guilt, mistakes, and human misconduct.