Assem Hendawi
© Assem Hendawi
Assem Hendawi’s practice focuses on research he undertakes through which he forms a dialogue between historical ingenuity and future imaginings. His film Everything Under Heaven explores the shifting coordinates of statehood in Egypt through the lens of its infrastructural ambition, and in doing so converges the old and the new.
Focusing on the post-1952 era — where following Egypt’s revolution and the expulsion of British occupiers, emerged a new national self-image — the film reflects on how the state has used large-scale development projects to embody a sense of nationhood. Mirroring the current manifestation of the New Administrative Capital in Egypt, it portrays a desperate attempt to reclaim sovereign form after the failure of emancipatory dreams. The state, we see, inscribes a new capital into the desert — a project whose scale renders it vulnerable to external influence where global information architectures, begin to rewire domestic imagination. As we observe its construction, it is confronted with shifting ground — where infrastructure no longer only serves the state but also tries to mediate its exposure to transnational circuits of influence, finance and data. As the city emerges as layered fiction, it reveals a contested reality: it is a city that will never exist, perpetually caught in a loop of creation and self-consumption.
Everything Under Heaven is a testament to how a nation’s self-image, sovereignty and territory are reconfigured under the weight of financial speculation and infrastructural entanglement.
Everything Under Heaven, 2022
Single-channel video, 17:59 min.
Courtesy the artist