Ebti: REcurring Utterances
Second Floor Gallery | July 20 - December 15th, 2023

Photographs printed on fabric, re-photographed and re-printed. They hang, obscure, and cover. 

Photographs on transparency are hung in a window and re-photographed, blurring interior and exterior. Iterative, redundant, and shifting through time and space, Ebti’s photographs expose some things while keeping others secret, intentionally and not, making visible the gaps in translation the artist experiences. Moving between countries, between cultures, between languages. “the way I've existed in the world is that I go in and out of languages, Arabic, German, English, French”

 Sometimes she has difficulty communicating.

Recurring Utterances includes two distinct bodies of work which both involve repetition and change. Studio 14 Windows were made in 2020 as the artist was in residence at the Marin Headlands. The giant window, 44x80,” (exactly twice the size of the prints on view here) served as a portal not only to the outdoors, but to her home in Cairo. A fabric print of a palm tree hung as a curtain, at times framing the window and others obstructing the view. The artist is at times seen in reflection, holding her camera, mid translation. Transparencies of photographs of lightbulbs, of scenes in Cairo, attached to the window, at once there and yet not solid. The artist invites us to occupy multiple spaces at once. 

We didn’t part but we will never meet again pt. II depicts the inside of Ebti’s family home in Cairo where her father lived above his antique shop. She would photograph the space when she visited, noticing the new objects he had collected. 

the pieces he liked best, he would put up in our apartment, and 
whenever we didn't have money and he brought people up in our apartment, 
I knew that it's serious because he's bringing them to see the good stuff.

After her father’s death, she began printing these photographs to hang in her studio, to bring one home into another, to bring Cairo to San Francisco, to bring her father’s presence into her space. Printed on fabric and pinned on the studio walls, the images become another still life to be photographed and re-printed. She reveals and obscures as one might in conversation. At times she chooses not to translate, so we see the obfuscation of the image. Perhaps there is no word for the thing she would like to say.