The Situation Is Fluid

Artist Statement

In May 2011, I was commissioned by Bidoun magazine to produce a bilingual street sign in English and Arabic – the type that is commonly seen in Cairo. It was to be similar to one produced by the artist Mona Hatoum during a 2006 residency at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, which featured the phrase waiting is forbidden. The sign I was to produce would declare: the situation is fluid, a phrase taken from a statement made by the White House regarding Egypt’s position shortly after the start of the January 25th Revolution. The words were ridiculed by Egyptian bloggers and activists as evidence of the problematic nature of US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Although the magazine eventually chose not to use the project, I remained interested in the concept. After I’d had the sign made, I began to take photographs of it in different places around Cairo. When I talked to people about the project, everyone responded to it strongly, bringing up different issues relating to the political and economic relationship between the US and Egypt, or the empty language of Egyptian politicians in the aftermath of the revolution.

In terms of the urban landscape, the sign brought into focus how very changeable the social and geographic fabric of a city can be in times of political flux. Becoming curious as to what sort of formal and conceptual resonances the sign might have in other cities around the world, I produced more signs and sent them to friends abroad, who then passed them on to their friends, and so on. Each person took a photograph of the sign in a location of his or her choosing, e-mailing the digital image and a brief description back to me. In its basic aesthetic form, the simple street sign is recognisable almost anywhere in the world, and it is easy to trust that it represents an official truth. But in many of these photographs, my street sign is effectively meaningless – like many of the words and symbols put forward by political authorities every day. I decided to compile all of the photographs together in one publication that would be easy to reproduce and circulate, just like the sign itself.


2013

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 11