In her inaugural solo exhibition at Hunna Art Gallery, entitled “They Call Me Divine,” artist Amina Yahia (b. 2000) turns her gaze toward the fragile architectures of society and environment that hold everyday life in contemporary Egypt together.
Her new paintings mark a threshold in her practice. They are neither strictly documentary nor overtly symbolic, but rather deeply intuitive and emotional translations of collective experience into an inner language of gesture, posture, and atmosphere. Yahia focuses on what it feels like to live amid the city’s restless transformation and to remain human within its urban erasures, environmental wounds, and social contradictions.
In her inaugural solo exhibition at Hunna Art Gallery, entitled “They Call Me Divine,” artist Amina Yahia (b. 2000) turns her gaze toward the fragile architectures of society and environment that hold everyday life in contemporary Egypt together. Her new paintings mark a threshold in her practice. They are neither strictly documentary nor overtly symbolic, but rather deeply intuitive and emotional translations of collective experience into an inner language of gesture, posture, and atmosphere. Yahia focuses on what it feels like to live amid the city’s restless transformation and to remain human within its urban erasures, environmental wounds, and social contradictions.
The artist speaks of these works as reflections, as opposed to depictions. They emerge from her observations of Cairo’s changing landscape and moments she witnessed in its streets. Faces met in passing, a relentless flow of bodies navigating constricted spaces, a flash of expression of fatigue or defiance. A period of regular commuting through the city gave the artist the occasion to develop a habit of looking even closer and meticulously reading the emotional temperature of those around her. While other commuters pushed and ached through Cairo’s relentless traffic by taking the new highways and flyover bridges that bypass the city center, Yahia insisted on taking detours through Downtown, preferring traffic and flurry to the blankness of the new roads. She describes how she “needed to see people every day in the street” to stay attuned to the pulse of collective life even as it seemed to dissolve. This insistence on witnessing from within the density of the city becomes the method of her painting.
Each canvas carries both the weight and lightness of that observation. Figures appear suspended between exhaustion and awareness, knowing and bewilderment, or collapse and endurance. They are often doubled or mirrored, as if to suggest the simultaneity of opposing states. The human faces and limbs carry resignation and resistance, pain and tenderness in states of waking and sleep. Her paintings rarely offer full visibility. Eyes are averted and landscapes flattened, and the people whose lives seem to be caught at a charged moment of ambiguous turmoil see their physical gestures curtailed. What is conjured is a subtle choreography of emotion, a vocabulary of movement that conveys the slow abrasion of living within systems that demand constant adaptation.
Yahia’s work resonates with a language of dream or hallucination. Scale, depth, and time dissolve as her figures move through indeterminate environments. Are the leafless branches of a black tree a harbinger of death, burnt to never carry leaves again, or quite the opposite, with life pulsating just beneath the surface and waiting to rupture from a winter’s sleep? Is the receding horizon hinting at an ecological crisis or the potential that lies ahead? And yet, the scenes, for they do have a cinematographic quality, are less about what is lost or absent than about what remains and thereby how the body, the psyche, and memory metabolize change. One painting, for example, evokes a pietà of sorts, a body resting across a woman’s lap while she sews the other’s lung. Here, the act of stitching flesh is not one of healing but of survival and shows an attempt to keep things from unraveling entirely. Yahia describes it as a reflection on how “we’re required to patch what is torn instead of being allowed to fix the root of the problem,” a gesture that mirrors a broader social condition of holding together what has already been fractured.
This layering of personal and collective experience runs throughout “They Call Me Divine.” The title hints at the contradictions between moral ideal and lived reality, and it also marks the reverence, and at times the hypocrisy, thrust upon the first-person speaker, while revealing nothing about their true nature. Who does the titular calling is also left undefined. “They” functions as an ambient chorus, possibly of family, faith, authority, convention, without a single source or special power. The title enters mid-conversation, and the speaker acknowledges being named before she could speak for herself. The statement is calm, already in motion. It registers as a condition rather than an accusation. What matters is the role ascribed, accepted matter-of-factly. The title proposes a narrator, but not a sovereign one. The artist stands inside the picture’s weather, at eye level with everyone else. She observes and is observed, one subject among subjects.
In Egyptian folklore, Yahia notes, the crow is both wise and ominous, credited with teaching Cain how to bury Abel, yet also feared as a bearer of misfortune. Appearing across several canvases, the crow mirrors the doubleness of the title, at once omen and observer, messenger and mirror. By folding and layering such symbols into her visual language, Yahia positions her work within a broader cultural imagination without resorting to illustration.
The loss of trees, the removal of gathering spaces, the erasure of the public realm. If some works evoke collective displacement, others probe the quieter forms of violence embedded in daily life. The depiction of pregnant girls is among the most unsettling. What first appears as innocence quickly collapses into an image of indoctrination, where childhood and motherhood co-exist in the same body. Nearby, in the same painting, stands a self-portrait, where the artist becomes an outsider to her own scene. She is older than the girls and should be autonomous, and yet, within this new order, she is seen as strange precisely for her autonomy. Through these juxtapositions, Yahia confronts the normalization of control and subjugation that shape women’s lives in both public and private spheres.
Across the exhibition, the figure of the woman recurs as a vessel of experience. She is one that bears the cumulative weight of social expectations and holds both personal memory and historical repetition. The women in Yahia’s paintings are not heroines or victims. They are thresholds between states of being and carry within them the contradictions of divinity and decay, of strength and vulnerability. Even if you can’t see their eyes, their strong gestures alone convey an intimacy amid their unstable surroundings, and there is a quiet dignity in their persistence.
Formally, Yahia’s palette oscillates between muted greys and deep umbers, punctuated by bruised tones of blue, black, yellow, and muddy reds, forming scenes that appear to seep from beneath the surface. The compositions are often spare yet dense with psychological charge. What would be negative space is occupied by a hazy field of atmosphere that holds an uneasy balance between silence and suffocation. It becomes a visual corollary to the collective, contradictory conditions she describes, of a city full of life and yet hostile to the living, a sun diffused by smog yet too bright to observe, lives lived between adaptation and amnesia.
At its heart, “They Call Me Divine” asks how to inhabit a world that keeps losing its ground. The paintings refuse resolution, but make space where contradiction can be felt. Even if nothing is conclusively resolved–because these conditions are, by their nature, unresolvable–something is nevertheless made visible long enough to be shared. In that interval, Yahia renders the invisible negotiations of daily survival and shows how bodies absorb history, how memory strains toward myth, and, perhaps above all, how, even amid fatigue, a stubborn, divine grace persists.
___ By Alexandra Stock, Curator
