In Cosmovision, her first solo exhibition in Cairo in more than a decade, Lara Baladi unfolds a practice that is as ambitious in scale as it is intimate in reflection. Presented at Tintera, one of Cairo’s few spaces dedicated to photography, the exhibition reads as both a personal archive and a meditation on the fate of the photographic image itself.
Baladi’s return to Cairo is significant. After more than ten years devoted to Vox Populi, her monumental archive of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the artist turns inward, revisiting decades of photographic production across geographies and contexts. Cosmovision is less a chronological survey than a dense constellation—where images are layered, recomposed, and recontextualised to question what photography can still mean in an era of infinite digital circulation.
The exhibition opens with a gesture of playfulness and self-awareness. A portrait by Youssef Nabil introduces Baladi as both subject and orchestrator, hinting at the humour and theatricality that run throughout the show. Nearby, walls covered in retro wallpaper evoke domestic interiors from 1970s Cairo, collapsing the distance between image, memory, and architecture. Here, photography is not merely displayed—it is embedded within material and emotional environments.
Baladi’s sensitivity to scale and materiality defines the exhibition. Rather than resisting reproduction, she anticipates it, multiplying images and recomposing them into monumental photographic tapestries. Individual photographs lose their singular authority, becoming threads within larger visual fabrics—a strategy she has explored since Sandouk El Dounia (2007). The image transforms from document into building block.
As visitors move through the gallery, Cosmovision unfolds as a journey through identity, faith, and urban experience. Works such as Oum El Dounia (2000) revisit Orientalist photographic traditions, not to reproduce them, but to invert their gaze. The subject looks back, reclaiming agency within images historically shaped by power and exoticisation.
The tension between analog and digital photography emerges forcefully in Digital Alienation (2003), where rows of photobooth self-portraits printed on plexiglass intersect with images of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The layering is unsettling, drawing parallels between the mass production of images and the simultaneous saturation of media violence—an association that resonates deeply with Baladi’s own biography shaped by war and displacement.
Throughout the exhibition, the city asserts itself as a dominant presence. Cairo appears not only as a backdrop but as a living force—chaotic, decaying, exuberant, and endlessly generative. Domestic interiors, nightlife scenes, abandoned spaces, and urban fantasies merge into a cosmology that feels both deeply personal and expansively political.
Cosmovision ultimately reflects Baladi’s position within a shifting spatio-temporal axis. Moving between Cairo, Beirut, Tokyo, New York, and beyond, she remains acutely aware of place and time. Photography, as a time-based medium, becomes her way of holding these fragments together. The result is a vision that is cosmopolitan without losing intimacy—playful yet rigorous, layered yet precise.
On view until: 11 January 2026
Location: Tintera, Cairo
