Biography – Aalam Wassef

Aalam Wassef
1970 - 2023

Aalam is a visual artist born in Cairo in 1970. He graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Aix-en-Provence, France, after which he started a decade-long career in publishing, notably at Éditions Gallimard in Paris. Commissioned in 1996 to develop the new media division of Éditions Gallimard, his team’s work was recognized for its innovations in interactive media publishing, becoming the recipient of the Bologna Bookfair Award, the Frankfurt Bookfair Award, and the Milia d’Or of Cannes for Best Interactive Creation. Aalam’s experience at Éditions Gallimard’s led to the development of his cross-media practice, and to the understanding that his artwork could reach the public through channels other than galleries, art institutions or art-related publications. This vision came to full fruition in 2006 with the début of his cross-media work under the alias ‘Ahmad Sherif’.

In parallel to his tenure at Éditions Gallimard, Aalam took a special interest in live radio performances. As a one-person act, or in collaboration with French writers François Sureau and Marc Lambron, he engaged in a series of dadaist, politically subversive radio performances which aired on France’s national radio, France Culture. His appearances in the program Culture Matin combined acting, sound pieces, original music and live performance.

From 2005-2008, he was a member of the independent art collective La Générale which organized exhibitions for its artists in an occupied space that was formerly a factory. Aalam contributed installations, sound performances and site-specific photography that addressed the questions of intimacy and privacy in the age of data collection by governments and technological giants.

Ever since, Aalam’s work has mainly focused on exploring forms of resistance against oppression whether they be political, technological or commercial.

In 2005, Aalam had his first solo photography exhibition, Black Wedding, at Galerie Marie Watteau in Paris.

In 2006, the Galeries Lafayette Foundation in Paris acquired his interactive lightbox installation, Don’t Be Evil, addressing Google’s rise as a private data-driven empire.

In 2005-2006, he conceived and directed a pamphlet series, Banc Public, published by Éditions Albin Michel in Paris, which discussed the politics of technological dominance.

Aalam returned to Cairo in 2006, a year which would become a turning point in his career as a cross-media artist, with the creation of a fictional avatar, Ahmad Sherif. The name ‘Ahmad Sherif’ served Aalam as an alias, allowing him to produce work which confronted Egypt’s dictatorship. ‘Ahmad Sherif’ became the prolific author of online songs, videos, articles, photographed installations and online collaborative happenings that misappropriated Google Ads and search engine results. This protean body of work attracted a large following in Egypt, and gained international attention when it was featured in mainstream international media including The Economist, Télérama and the BBC among others. The creative and exhibitionary process of the Ahmad Sherif series lasted 3 years. The series was critically well-received, and was granted a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention in 2008.

In 2008-2010, Aalam opened a studio space in the working-class neighbourhood of Sayyeda Zeinab in Cairo. Working under his real name, Wassef also lived there as a means of connecting directly with the public. His site-specific series 000-001 comprised installations in artisans’ workshops and video installations in abandoned spaces. Later, 12 artists – both Egyptian and foreign – were also welcomed into the neighbourhood to make temporary or permanent artworks. Aalam’s work had no commercial motivations, but rather, was formulated as an independent exercise to address political subjects through poetic gestures that would not draw the attention of the authorities. In his 2009 exhibition, We Will Be Heroes, a mural bearing 3000 handwritten names can now be viewed as premonitory, evoking the optimism in the 2011 uprising during which many hopes were high, yet ultimately many lives were lost. This work led him to meeting German photographer Philip Gaiszer.

Together, Aalam and Gaiszer collaborated on a joint exhibition, Convention, at Galerie Conradi in Hamburg in 2010, after which Aalam developed a relationship with gallery owner Elena Winkel and was represented by her gallery for nine years. In 2010, curators Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin featured his work in the exhibition Alias at Photo Krakow which showed the work of artists who produced and disseminated artworks anonymously.

From 2011 to 2014, during the Arab Spring, Aalam’s pre-revolutionary work and new productions were exhibited in museums around the world, notably the Neuberger Museum in New York as part of the Dear Diary exhibition. The Frankfurter Kunstverein featured his work in the show, Demonstrations. Making Normative Orders, which was jointly curated by Britta Peters, Fanti Baum and Sabine Witt. During that period, Aalam’s work received extensive press coverage in Libération, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Huffington Post, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and was featured frequently by Arte TV, CNN and DW among others.

From 2011 to 2014, Aalam was an active contributing member of the Mosireen Media Collective, an independent online platform which documented Egypt’s revolution and counter-revolution. The combined work of its members led to the creation of an online audiovisual archive called 858, An Archive of Resistance, comprising 858 hours of archival footage.

In 2014 Aalam was arrested by the Egyptian police. He was released after 24 hours of questioning. Upon his release and fearing possible retaliation, he destroyed his archives and removed his content and artworks from the Internet.

In 2015, his work was featured in the anthology, Art and Conflict in the 21st Century (ZKM & MIT Press), under the direction of Peter Weibel.

From 2017 to 2020 Aalam worked on the subjects of censorship and suppression, looking for strategies of expression that could reopen a space for his work. He created a private Instagram channel with 150 chosen guests. The channel presented 40 short videos under one minute that became the inspiration for a short film which he finished producing in April 2019 titled Swim, True Stories From Kamalozten. Swim was secretly shown at Cimathèque in Cairo, in front of an audience of 35 people. Swim tells the story of a satirist living in the fictional dictatorship of ‘Kamalozten’. Confined in his apartment, the satirist produces work that he knows cannot be kept or shown. He is seen constantly erasing or hiding his satirical work. Swim is narrated in English and in Aalam’s invented language of ‘Kamalozteni’ which helps to underscore the absurdity of the subject of censorship and suppression.

Following in the footsteps of the late Erich Salomon, Aalam researched methods and created cameras by which he could discreetly take pictures in public. In doing so, A was able to circumvent local Egyptian laws that prevent civilians from making photographs of public spaces and subjects. Rendering himself invisible as a photographer, he created a street-based photography series called Stay Home. This series echoes the contemporary imperative to shelter in personal spaces during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The series means to explore the nuances of vulnerability experienced by people during a time of great political oppression. It also raises the ethical dilemma of representing, or not, the undignifying reality of another human’s condition in a context of state-sponsored disinformation and censorship. The series has not been publicly exhibited yet.

Alam passed away in 2023, after a battle with cancer. His passing left a tremendous void, but his work continues to resonate, a testament to his sensitivity, creativity, and the profound impact he had on those who had the chance to know him and admire his art.

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Voices travel where bodies cannot

Aalam Wassef

1970 / 2023

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