In her latest solo exhibition at Hunna Art Gallery in Kuwait, Egyptian artist Amina Yahia investigates the subtle yet forceful systems shaping contemporary life in Egypt — from the built environment to the emotional interiority of its people. They Call Me Divine, a title suspended between reverence and indictment, unfolds like a whispered confession. It hints at a narrator, but also at the women inhabiting Yahia’s canvases, who appear caught between melancholy, resistance and the weight of expectation.
Yet the exhibition’s true protagonist remains invisible: Cairo itself. The city becomes an atmospheric imprint throughout the show — a presence inferred from colour, gesture and mood rather than literal depiction. Growing up in Cairo, Yahia observed how political and social shifts manifested in public institutions, domestic spaces, and even the smallest exchanges between people. These accumulations, she explains, have carved out a terrain of collective grief — the exhaustion of a society oscillating between revolutionary promise and entrenched colonial, patriarchal and class-based systems.
Her paintings emerge from that fatigue, embodying the slow pressure of institutional neglect and the psychic strain of endurance.
Rituals of Survival
In Can you breathe (2025), Yahia visualises what she calls “the quiet tortures embedded in bureaucracy and daily life.” The work shows a man collapsed across a woman’s lap. She threads his lungs back into place — a gesture at once maternal, medical, and profoundly intimate. Her hands are calm and focused; his body slackens into an atmosphere rendered in muted umbers reminiscent of dust and desert. The near-meditative act of sewing mirrors the monotonous cycles of coping that have become normalised, forming rituals of survival.
“There’s something almost spiritual in that repetition,” Yahia notes — a cyclic acceptance that borders on the sacred.
This tension between healing and dissolution echoes across the exhibition. Figures appear mid-transformation, their surroundings blurred or dissolving, recalling aspects of Impressionism in the way Yahia captures sensations rather than fixed realities. Her subjects carry the weight of turbulent systems not only in their memories but in their bodies.
Women as the Bearers of Burden
Curator Alexandra Stock highlights Yahia’s attention to the lived realities of women: “the ones who carry the cumulative weight of social expectations.” In Tell my mother (2025), young girls — no older than ten — stand visibly pregnant, their faces blank, their forms painted in subdued grey. The work confronts the painful reality of child marriage in working-class and rural communities in Egypt. Here, marriage becomes an enforced rite, a social imposition that fractures the boundary between childhood and adulthood. For Yahia, this ‘sacred’ institution, upheld in the name of tradition, becomes a kind of inherited illness.
The title demands accountability — a plea for someone to witness and respond.
Domesticity, Madness, and Generational Loops
Redolence II (2025) extends Yahia’s inquiry to the domestic and medical spheres, examining how psychological distress in women is often dismissed as ‘madness’. The painting suspends a woman in a liminal space, either rising or falling, while a child observes her. The child’s gaze completes a generational cycle, hinting at how unaddressed pain becomes the blueprint for another lifetime.
The Crow as Witness and Messenger
A recurring motif in the exhibition is the crow, inspired by a passing remark from Yahia’s mother. In Egyptian folklore, the crow oscillates between sacred intelligence and ominous superstition. In Tell my mother, the bird watches silently; in يا غراب، انت زعلان مني؟ (oh crow, are you upset with me?) (2025), it appears three times alongside a young girl — a symbolic courier of inherited fears, moral codes, and unspoken pressures.
The crow’s duality mirrors the exhibition’s title. The “divine” referred to here is not transcendent; it is the sacredness constructed by society to justify control, discipline and loss. But there is also another sacredness — a quieter, humbler one — found in the way ordinary people care for one another amid systems they cannot change.
Yahia’s paintings hover at the point where these two forms of sacredness collide. They Call Me Divine ultimately suggests that divinity lies not beyond human experience but within endurance itself — the perseverance required to live inside unstable structures.
They Call Me Divine runs until 3 December.
