absence)/(presence
this series addresses absence and presence as shifting
and interlocking nodes of queer experience that
cannot be mapped onto a progressive politic of
visibility, where mundane spaces and objects in my and
my partner’s home create embodied absences as well as
embody lingering presences related to our careful
navigations of the private sphere in cairo. this
navigation is further ruptured by my partner’s forced
inscription into the national military, where he was
absent from this home for over twenty days before
forcing his own release.
inspired by tina campt’s work on stillness/stasis,
absence)/(presence refuses the straightforward
visibility of queer persons at different positions of
precarity to state regimes and instead engages an
alternate sensory arrangement to bodily-optical tactics
of the hetero/militaristic. here, scenes of care and
intimacy do not call on a promised humanity but
rather refute the structures ensuring such a promise is
never fulfilled. this can be seen in the apricots, a
“precocious” fruit (coming from the arabic “barqūq”)
long considered a military curse, that we coincidentally
feed one another in a hidden corner of our living room
days after my partner’s return.
within these tensions of image and text, of light,
shadow, and refraction, absence)/(presence evokes
queerness’ entanglements with quotidian voids that
confound the visible/legible while also questioning
viewers’ differential access to them.
and interlocking nodes of queer experience that
cannot be mapped onto a progressive politic of
visibility, where mundane spaces and objects in my and
my partner’s home create embodied absences as well as
embody lingering presences related to our careful
navigations of the private sphere in cairo. this
navigation is further ruptured by my partner’s forced
inscription into the national military, where he was
absent from this home for over twenty days before
forcing his own release.
inspired by tina campt’s work on stillness/stasis,
absence)/(presence refuses the straightforward
visibility of queer persons at different positions of
precarity to state regimes and instead engages an
alternate sensory arrangement to bodily-optical tactics
of the hetero/militaristic. here, scenes of care and
intimacy do not call on a promised humanity but
rather refute the structures ensuring such a promise is
never fulfilled. this can be seen in the apricots, a
“precocious” fruit (coming from the arabic “barqūq”)
long considered a military curse, that we coincidentally
feed one another in a hidden corner of our living room
days after my partner’s return.
within these tensions of image and text, of light,
shadow, and refraction, absence)/(presence evokes
queerness’ entanglements with quotidian voids that
confound the visible/legible while also questioning
viewers’ differential access to them.