Noha Mokhtar. From the series No Nile View. ‘Kitchen window square’, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist

Apsara Studio is pleased to present No Nile View, a body of work by Swiss-Egyptian transdisciplinary artist Noha Mokhtar, curated by Gema Darbo, associate curator and PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. 

On view at Apsara Studio, Battersea Park Road, the exhibition offers an overview of Mokhtar’s speculative and generative practice. Her work is distinguished by its seemingly natural relationship between disciplines, where photography, ethnographic research and fiction writing are in an ongoing, fluid conversation. Currently a fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome, Mokhtar’s exhibition is supported by the Swiss Cultural Fund and the Swiss Embassy, marking her first presentation in the United Kingdom.

In No Nile View, Mokhtar reimagines domestic interiors as speculative spaces, where traces of past lives linger and possible futures shimmer beyond temporal and spatial contours. Drawing its title from Mokhtar’s eponymous book co-authored with Gregor Huber, the gaze shifts away from the touristic interest in Cairo’s monumental landmarks to the confined interiors of middle and upper-class homes. Woven through an evocative and memorable visual narrative, at the heart of Mokhtar’s work lies the enduring question: what makes a home, home?

Presented as a sequence of photographs taken during a months-long search for housing in Cairo with Huber, the series begins as a form of visual note-taking. Fragmentary scenes of kitchens, hallways, bathrooms and living rooms, are initially captured by Mokhtar as registers of possibility: spaces once inhabited waiting to be lived in once again. But as the visits progress, the gaze gradually shifts, and the prospect of tenancy turns into an ethnographic attention to detail: the worn surfaces, the heavy curtains, the awkwardness of a built-in wardrobe. Over time, the images coalesce into loose categories, creating a composite of memories and surreal images that seem to depict the interior of a single imagined architecture, where dispersed fragments from different homes merge into one.  

In this new iteration, the series is displayed in a single straight line across the two rooms of the gallery space. This linear pattern anchors a central viewpoint, offering the viewer a sense of stability and orientation. However, on closer inspection, the images appear rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, leaving furniture and architectural features (such as ornate columns, coffered ceilings, balconies, and stained glass windows) subtly compromised. Within these altered interiors, Mokhtar suggests that domestic spaces reveal a latent exteriority, where windows covered by translucent foil become portals, and the thin gap between a built-in wardrobe and the wall becomes thresholds to non-specific worlds.

Mokthar’s photographic images are printed on offset blue carbon paper, creating a dense and textured atmosphere. Here, once freed from its original use for registration and duplication, the material has been repurposed into a translucent archive: sensitive to every mark and fleeting touch, the surface is imprinted with the traces of past lived experiences. Gaston Bachelard reminds us that placing memories in time is the task of the biographer, but placing them in space is what provides us with knowledge of our intimacy. In No Nile View, gestures of rotation, dislocation and imprinting open interstitial spaces that allow intimacy to emerge, rendering the familiar strange while opening the domestic sphere to evade enclosures.  

On the gallery’s front window is a textual installation. Placed in dialogue with the blue series, a numbered quote recalls Mokhtar’s own years living in Cairo, when a house she inhabited became a passageway for temporary flatmates. The sentence is part of a set of printed captions accompanying each photograph. As readers move through the listing, Mokhtar suspends our assumptions: through the act of unnaming, the words open up an unexpected set  of relations, weaving together personal memories, lived experiences, and the emotions these images evoke in her.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a selection of Mokhtar’s recent publications will be on display, many produced with Edition Hors-Sujet, an interdisciplinary publishing project founded in Zurich by Gregor Huber, Ivan Sterzinger, and the artist herself in 2020. On June 7, during the London Gallery Weekend, Mokhtar will present a performance followed by a conversation with Irit Rogoff moderated by Gema Darbo.