Flash Art International
No. 241 (March-April 2005)
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

With his debut exhibition of photographs at Townhouse, Osama Dawod joins such artists as Hassan Khan and Randa Shaath in bringing the rhythms and textures on contemporary Cairo to the art world’s international stage. Dawod is a street photographer in the traditional sense, working in the same robust vein as Brassai and Weegee.

He stalks his city as both flaneur and voyeur, capturing the candid and clandestine moments that give strength, urgency and occasional beauty to the living experience of metropolitan life.

Yet perhaps because his city is Cairo (a chaotic urban sprawl that is sometimes too complex and contradictory to be believed, splattered onto the geographic map of the developing world when it’s not standing in as an placeholder for ancient Egyptian splendor) and because his time is now (the 21st century, the age of globalization and cookie-cutter urbanism that posits all cities as structurally similar, if not essentially the same), Dawod steps nimbly along a number of political fault lines.

Dawod’s images achieve anonymity while retaining a deep sense of intimacy. They sidestep distinct markers of place as he directs his camera away from recognizable tourist traps and focuses instead on everyday life. Are the grooves of daily routine and traces of visual culture, Dawod seems to ask, the same in all cities? His urban scenes could be anywhere, and in fact, it turns out they were not taken in Cairo at all but rather in New York.

People may be present in these pictures, but they are incidental. What is of interest to Dawod are traces and surfaces – paint peeling off a building façade, stencils, advertising flyers and stray scratches of graffiti.

The street and he is not heroic about the subcultures that make their mark there. Dawod resists even the monumentality of his own art by printing his pictures (from 35mm film) onto disposable paper, creating surfaces as fragile and ephemeral as the ones he photographs. As such, these works are surface on which languages will be written, erased and rewritten all over again.