Ebtihal
Shedid

CCA MFA 2021

We didn't part, but we will never meet again. Attempts of remembering-ance and preservation Part I

We didn't part, but we will never meet again. Attempts of remembering-ance and preservation Part II

Involuntary vertigo

A table is a table

Thesis

Artist Statement

It’s about time.

I want to remember.

The future is not now. The future started yesterday.

Yesterday is a door that allows us to walk into a story, a narrative, a history.

Today is a chair we sit in, rest in, wait in, like a lamp in a window.

Tomorrow is a table, it’s what we put our stories on, leaving them behind and they outlive us.

The objects don’t matter, it is about creating a space, a space to exist and to tell stories.

A home of stories that shows us where we come from and where we are heading.

I see my work as documentary, though not anywhere near the traditional sense, rather in the way I see every photograph I take as a documentation of time and space. Marking the passage of time and recording how spaces change. Both the light and places of things keep changing. At some point in time every picture will become a document. A photograph and time usually result in some sort of magic.

I observed this more than once before. To me it feels like pictures reveal themselves only after some time has passed. Oftentimes I come to perceive what I first saw in a photograph maybe months or even years after taking it. Perhaps with an ever-evolving way of perceiving photographs, I can see the images in a different light? Or maybe they make more sense after some time has passed?

Through my work, I hope to have managed to create a memory. A memory that is less of the past and more for the future. One memory as a part of a collective memory. To me art is a form of resistance and if everything else fails, it’s a way to preserve stories and narratives.

I’m a poet without a mother tongue, driven by Sehnsucht, a longing to deep, it has no beginning and now end. I see the world through the languages I speak, of which I master none.

Download an exceprt from Ebtihal's thesis

Ebtihal Shedid is a self-taught Egyptian photographer based in San Francisco. She is currently a grad student at the California College of the Arts exploring the intersections of photography, sculpture, collage, and installation. Shedid comes from a background of linguistics, translation, and intercultural communication, and is interested in topics surrounding how language shapes the way we see and interprets ideas such as storytelling, belonging, and attachment.