Art Taaalkssss: Noha Mokhtar

Noha Mokhtar, Lila, 2021, exhibition view Werkschau, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, photo: Peter Baracchi

Noha Mokhtar (lives and works between Zurich, Cambridge, and Cairo) studied photography at ECAL in Lausanne and Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Bern. Currently she is pursuing a PhD in Social Anthropology and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University in Cambridge, where she conducts research on the relationship between architecture, kinship and materiality in contemporary Egypt. Her artistic practice includes photography, video, installation, as well as writing, and borrows from methods of ethnographic research. With projects oscillating between fiction and non-fiction, she seeks a critical engagement with notions of culture, family, gender, and the built environment. 

For Art Taaalksssss, Noha Mokhtar speaks about dislocation as a methodological tool to explore the spaces in-between things (categories, disciplines, cultures, etc.), and show how these spaces come to exist only when a movement traverses them, by means of a (meandering) motion, or (imperfect) translation that is generative of new openings. She further speaks about bathtubs, kleenex box covers, bed corners, and how we can weave together the intimate, the domestic, and the monumental.

Noha Mokhtar’s work has been exhibited at Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich; Centre d‘Art Contemporain, Geneva; Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona; Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; Le lieu secret, Biel/Bienne; among other. Since 2018, she runs, together with Gregor Huber and Ivan Sterzinger, the publishing initiative Edition Hors-Sujet.