“WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU CANNOT HOLD A MOUNTAIN BETWEEN YOUR ARMS?“
A solo exhibition by Ebrahim Bahaa-Eldin
A question found its way to my notebook some time ago. I had no answer back then.
The question left me with nothing but the heaviness of ignorance. Slowly, some answers
started to be stacked below the question. ‘You walk along its slopes’, I answered. ‘Perhaps
the physical disparity registers’, I added. ‘Or you walk away and put it behind your back,
but its shadow will follow you as your foot tries to make the earth rotate faster, hoping to
push the mountain further behind you. You might come back, this time just to take a
photograph, but the photograph wouldn’t fit in your pocket, or it would be too heavy to
carry around. You might bring others, show them around, and think maybe together you
would find a way. On another day, you might come back, this time with dynamite, ready to
turn the mountain inside out, thinking that only then, you would manage to hold it
between your arms. On a different day, you might come back, this time just to stand there,
do nothing, and see if the mountain would hold you.’
‘What to do when you cannot hold a mountain between your arms?’ is a long-term
photography project that examines the two ends of the spectrum of our relationship to our
surroundings, care and conquest, and tries to think through the memory of space and
preservation.
E. B.
2024
