AMINA KADOUS :
We Carry What We Cannot Name
“There’s always this question I ask myself: what is more important, to remember or to forget? I’ve never been able to answer this. I don't think it's possible to completely erase our histories, we will always remember.”
Is memory real or a construction? / A fragment of the past that aims to reform in the present / Is it liquid or solid? / shifting and dynamic, racing at light speed / can a memory break? Crack. Reveal. / And what lies inside the edges of this half dream, half manifestation of spacetime?
Based in Cairo, award-winning Egyptian photographer, Amina Kadous is exploring ideas of transformation in her hometown post revolution, the shifts that have occurred and what has remained the same, “My interests in photography came in parallel with the shifts that were happening in Cairo. It’s a very site-specific tool that re-introduced me to my own city.”
“My interests in photography came in parallel with the shifts that were
happening in Cairo. It’s a very site-specific tool that re-introduced me to my own city.”
In 2011, the Tahrir Square revolution deposed Hosni Mubarak, the fourth president of Egypt, who had been in power since 1981. “I left before the revolution, and I came back to a different Cairo, a different image of the city. I didn’t get to experience it physically or be a part of that change, I felt like there was something missing, so I was trying to fill that gap.” She says. Fundamentally, all work of art is about identity, the author is faced with the entire world and must find concerns and mold meaning out of the noise. “In 2015, when I returned to Cairo after finishing university, it was a really important time in my life. I had just lost my grandparents…it was a shifting moment, where I knew I had to find myself, not only that but also find out ‘where do I exist in this change?’”
The echoes of protest and political upheaval have a lasting impact on the outer landscape of a place, and the inner landscape of the people who exist within it. “I wanted to wander and explore, I always say I grew up in the shadows of my family,” Amina says, reflecting on the literal act of being young and following a family member around. “I grew up with their memories. That’s why the concept of memory is an important topic in my work, because it’s not just about nostalgic memories, it’s beyond nostalgia. It's about a history that has been lived, that I may not have been a part of. We take it on, we are shaped by it even though we may not have lived it. My grandparents who lived in the 60s, I carry that history with me because I am part of their lineage.”
“I wanted to explore this lineage of memory, in parallel to our memories of change. How
does this change affect us as people, change our perspectives and how we perceive
ourselves in the current moment.”
Like a ritual, every Saturday morning Kadous and a group of photographers would take walks in and around Cairo, through daily encounters with people, places and streets they were trying to get closer. “I wanted to understand the change and figure out ‘what is my role?’ My role towards the people, towards my culture. I’ve always been interested in how my history affects my surroundings.” She continues, “But also how my surroundings and culture affect my personal history. It is a two way dialogue. You can’t just say history affects us, we also affect history.”
These voyages into the city culminated as Kadous’ first photographic project City Entrapped, centered around old Cairo, where people are still living in their own past and stretching into an unknown future. “Just like myself, they are living in a certain era they can’t get past. It’s like a threshold that they can’t get past or get over. They cherish certain icons on their walls, whether it be religious, political or even personal icons.” says Kadous. The work asks more questions through people’s relationships with certain symbols of a particular time. ‘Is it a fear of the present? A resistance of the future or an act of questioning the past? Or do such figures represent certain ideologies that they still hold onto till today?’
But what does it mean to document memory in a city where time folds in on itself, where history isn’t linear but cyclical—repeating, refracting, resisting closure? In Kadous’ work, the act of photographing becomes less about capturing and more about excavating. It is less about freezing a moment and more about entering a dialogue with it. Her images are not just visual records but emotional maps—each frame tracing a lineage, a fracture, a question. The camera becomes a tool not of certainty but of searching, where memory is not just observed, but felt.
This process of looking became a ritual, a way of searching not just for images but for anchors. There is a quiet resistance in the way she notices—the way she lingers on objects, gestures, spaces imbued with presence. Whether it’s a cracked wall, a folded cloth, or a passing glance between strangers, each photograph holds within it the tension between presence and absence. Her work does not claim to preserve the past, but rather to engage with it—to hold it gently, and to ask what still lingers beneath the surface.
In this way, photography becomes an act of care—an offering, a witness, a means of holding space for stories that are often overlooked or intentionally forgotten. Kadous isn’t documenting from a distance; she’s inside the narrative, shaped by it and shaping it in return. The personal and political fold into each other, as images become vessels for both inherited memory and self-inquiry. Her work resists closure, instead inviting the viewer to pause, to question, to return. What is remembered is not fixed—it is alive, shifting, and still becoming.
“After City Entrapped, another turning point was looking inward. If these people are carrying political and religious icons, I started asking what my personal icons were…who could I look at as a role model. I realized that I lived all my life with my grandmother. She’s my last surviving grandmother. I wanted to document her, specifically document her interactions in her space.”
“She was born in 1945, she saw Egypt’s monarchy during British colonial times, and she's seen it until now. She lived every single era. And she remembers, her memory is better than mine actually.”
“Her space is like a cocoon but also a time machine, go in and you travel in time. We enter her room, and it’s sort of different. There’s a different altitude in everything, with her small miniatures and the portrait of her father. Her around her bed, in her chair. She has her own ritual. For me, she represented home. She represented Egypt with all the different faces.”
On remembering, Egyptian writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi once wrote, ‘Memory is never complete. There is always part of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic.’ Through her photographic work, Amina Kadous is retrieving personal stories that form part of a history untold.
In 2022, Kadous won the Contemporary African Photography Prize for her body of work White Gold, an ongoing project that weaves together the history of her birthplace El-Mahalla El-Kubra, a city where the first textile mill on the African continent was built, with her own family archives, the images of the textile factories and cotton plantations, composing a familial chronicle of lineage, nationhood and the passage of time.
“Photography has helped me dig into the gaps of our history. The gaps of our culture. I am able to dig into unknown archives, abandoned and silenced histories of communities that lived in Egypt, who we didn’t really acknowledge or have forgotten. The image is not enough, because it’s just one. You have to look at all the angles, the image can lie and it can tell the truth. It can be both.”
“Photography has grounded me, and helped me understand myself and our collective
history, and how each of us completes the circle. Our stories are all important.”
WEBSITE: www.aminakadous.com
INSTAGRAM : @amina.kadous