Nermine Hammam (b. 1967, Cairo) is an Egyptian photo artist working between Cairo and London. Trained as a filmmaker at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, she worked on Spike Lee's Malcolm X during its Egyptian shoot before turning to photography in the late 1990s.
Hammam’s practice begins with the photograph and moves through digital manipulation, painting, collage and archival layering. Across series including Upekkha, Cairo Year One, Metanoia, Wétiko: Cowboys and Indigenes, Ma'at and A'aru, she stages familiar images — the soldier, the icon, the wounded body — and works them until they stop obeying their original meanings. The cinematic foundation persists: her images operate as suspended frames, holding the tension of something just outside view.
She has exhibited at the Mosaic Rooms, London; Rose Issa Projects, London; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Safarkhan Gallery, Cairo; Tintera Gallery, Cairo; Hôtel des Arts, Toulon; Gypsum Gallery, Cairo; the Institut des Cultures d'Islam, Paris; and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman. Her work has been shown in over one hundred group exhibitions internationally, including Light from the Middle East at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Arab Contemporary at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; In Rebellion at IVAM, Valencia; Human.Kind: Prix Pictet at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, Geneva; Social Calligraphies at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; the X Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador; Rencontres de Bamako; Photoquai at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris; and the Jaou Tunis Biennial.
Her work is held in the public collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Horcynus Orca, Messina; and Durham University, UK. She received the Freedom to Create First Prize in 2011, and her work has been recognised by the Julia Margaret Cameron Award and the Worldwide Photography Gala Awards.
Arabic summary · نبذة مختصرة
نرمين همام فنانة مصرية تعمل بين القاهرة ولندن، وتجمع في ممارستها الفنية بين التصوير الفوتوغرافي والرسم والكولاج الرقمي. درست صناعة السينما في جامعة نيويورك، وما زالت هذه الخلفية حاضرة في بناء صورها وتسلسلها. تنطلق من الصور الفوتوغرافية والأرشيفية، وتعيد تشكيلها لاستكشاف الذاكرة والسلطة والهوية، وما تُظهره الصورة وما تُخفيه. عُرضت أعمالها في متاحف ومؤسسات فنية دولية، وتُقتنى أعمالها ضمن مجموعات عامة وخاصة.
The edge of the photograph can exclude as much as it includes. That is what I trust least about the photograph, and what the work begins with.
The photograph is taken, then altered, layered, painted through, and returned changed. The final image is not a record. It is the residue of what the image was trying to conceal.
There is a moment when a symbol stops obeying itself — when the soldier appears fragile, when ceremony reveals violence, when the body in trance becomes political. Familiar images are where power hides most effectively, and where it can also be undone. The work returns again and again to bodies caught at the threshold: between fear and ritual, military and tender, public and private. That threshold is where the surface begins to break.
My foundation is cinematic — sequences, cuts, silences, suspended frames. Even when the work is still, it holds the tension of something just outside view, something happening, or about to happen, at the edge.
Beauty is never neutral. Seductive surfaces, ornament and painterly colour slow the eye down, not to soften violence but to bring the viewer in through pleasure and leave them with the structures beneath it: gender, militarism, faith, empire.
Since the revolutions, the mechanism of trust between the image and the viewer has collapsed. I do not try to restore it. The work asks what remains when the image no longer obeys the story it was made to serve.
Education, professional projects, collections, awards and public talks. Open any part.
Education
1990
B.F.A. in Filmmaking, New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, New York, USA
Projects & Professional Experience
1994 – 2011
Founding Director, Equinox Graphics. Design portfolio production for international clients spanning the commercial, financial, art & design, food & beverage, and educational sectors. Previous clients included Cilantro and Diwan Bookstore (Cairo).
1991 – 1992
Production Assistant (Film Production – Main), Malcolm X (dir. Spike Lee), on location in Egypt.
