Gema Darbo, APSARA Studio: No Nile View is an evocative title. It kind of suggests looking at other places. This work stems from a book of the same name, co-authored with Gregor Huber, where the notion of ‘home’ is central to it. However, in your work, this idea of home seems to be more speculative than offering a fixed definition. Can you tell us a bit about this?

Noha Mokhtar: I'm drawn to concrete, familiar, everyday things - a sofa, a Kleenex box cover, the outdated page of a diary. I look at them until they begin to shift, becoming strange. In German, the word unheimlich captures this feeling: it comes from Heim - the home - but also contains Geheimnis, secret - something familiar that should have remained hidden. We photographed homes in Cairo with this layered perspective in mind. At the time, Gregor and I were looking for a place to live - searching for a home. But we were also searching for the uncanny in them: the narrow gap between a wardrobe and a wall, forever unreachable. These apartments were filled with impressionable surfaces - carpets, walls and ceilings that seemed to have absorbed all the dreams and memories. Some were our own, imagined in the act of choosing - what if we lived here? - and others belonged to those who came before or would come after.

Questions of domesticity, kinship and material culture are central to your research and practice. Your visual narrative style blends disciplinary knowledge with personal observation, and this engagement with fiction and subjectivity. In which way does it unveil your personal journey?

My approach often begins with close observation - attending to the everyday and the intimate. I do this not only as an artist and anthropologist, but also as someone shaped by multiple cultures, as an inhabitant of this planet, and as a mother. I intentionally blend perspectives and borrow from various fields because I’m not a specialist in any one area; I embrace the freedom of being an amateur. This allows me to cultivate a mode of attention that welcomes gaps and contradictions, and resists the urge for complete explanation, or control.

Your work navigates between fiction and non-fiction. What does this paradigm allow you to do within your practice that otherwise you could not?

It allows me to delve into the layered nature of memory - how it shifts, fractures and transforms over time. Much of my work springs from a personal place: a fragment of a story, a familial object, or a remembered space. I reimagine and reframe these experiences - not to conceal, but to make sense of them. It also invites me to embrace uncertainty, to work with “not knowing” or not knowing for sure. To play with possibilities, with maybes, rather than fixed certainties. We all want to know everything - On voudrait tout savoir! - but what a mistake that would be.

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Find out more about the projects supported by the Swiss Cultural Fund UK

Main image: Noha Mokhtar, 'No Nile View', 2025, installation view at Apsara Studio. Photography: James Retief.