Press release:

​

Yasmine El Meleegy’s project starts with a moment of retrieval: the repair of a doll gifted to her mother from her father on their wedding day. The doll signified more than a marital bond, it was an extension of El Meleegy’s mother, an intimate fixture in her household, and the centerpiece of her carefully preserved display of sentimental objects and knick-knacks. Obsessed with the task of continuously repairing, remaking, and restoring household objects as a mechanism for mending familial relationships, ElMeleegy delves into the myriad connotations of reconstruction.
 

This exhibition explores questions surrounding fixability. Any restoration process faces a doublethink; it may either stage a regressive return to a past functionality, or proceed with a progressive imagination of an ulterior future.

In turning her attention to the public sphere, El Meleegy seeks to understand the inner workings of renovation efforts in the context of architecture, monuments, and public space. In her research on the Europa and the bull sculptures in Alexandria, El Meleegy observed that renovation initiatives in Egypt are more often remakes than restorations,an indication of an unconscious or conscious alteration of the past to fit present social and aesthetic mores.

The notion of alteration provides the impetus behind her video work, wherein she uses tools such as photoshop to reconstruct domestic images excavated from her past.
Additionally, in constructing an ornate fountain display comprised of bricks and wax as the center of the exhibition, El Meleegy unravels the artifice of public sculptures by restaging an alteration of the past.

El Meleegy’s solo exhibition is a garden of materiality; cement, brick, wax, porcelain, prints, and painting containing objects in the process of renovation. Inflected by memory and preoccupied with fixability, Rites of passage displays an intimate cycle of

excavation restoration, and creation.

By Mariam El Nozahy