Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with Youssef Nabil, No one Knows but the Sky.
Cinema forms the stage upon which the photographic and video work of Youssef Nabil unfolds. Within it, the history of Egyptian cinema coexists with his childhood memories of Cairo, shaped by the film posters of a country that remains a major center of popular culture. Through its images, sounds, and stories, Egyptian cinema has shaped tastes, morals, and even language across the Arab world for decades. Through cinema, Nabil encountered art for the first time, and it remains the lens through which he has continued to observe and register the many transformations of his native land.
More than a reference to his origins or to a particular region, Nabil’s work and its centrality to the cinematic universe appear fundamentally preoccupied with the act of remembering itself. It recalls a world that survives only thanks to photographic record, through the freezing of an instant once fixed onto silver gelatin prints, and that today is captured predominantly in digital form. Time, a question central to the French film theorist André Bazin, lies at the core of this reflection: photography, Bazin writes, “embalms” it by halting it, while cinema goes even further by “mummifying” change.
The work of Youssef Nabil, like art and cinema itself, is intrinsically bound to the inevitable passing of the artist and of each successive audience. But unlike others who work within this inescapable reality by measuring themselves against impossible ambitions of posterity, Nabil places this reality at the very center of his artistic creation: his work revolves around death in an unambiguous way.
Youssef Nabil contemplates the passage of time, and in his work preserves traces of its transformations. Among this is an icon of Egyptian cinema: the belly dancer. Once symbols of a modern and cosmopolitan nation, belly dancers have, in recent decades, undergone a profound shift in popular perception. Under a generalized rise of conservatism and increased state scrutiny, the figure of the belly dancer has come to be perceived as morally questionable, dangerous to practice, and confined to a private, regulated sphere. It is this symbolic disappearance that Nabil both bears witness to and seeks to counter, preserving the cinematic essence of their breathtaking sensuality, as performed by Salma Hayek and Tahar Rahim in I Saved My Belly Dancer (2015).
The journey of a lifetime is contemplated in The Beautiful Voyage (2021), a video in which Charlotte Rampling reflects on the fleeting nature of existence while the artist’s mother recites Constantine P. Cavafy’s poem Ithaca, words that evoke the epic departure that life itself represents. And finally, in The Room (2025), Nabil dares to cross the threshold of death guided by artist Marina Abramović, who, like an angel, awakens him from the dream that is life and leads him gently toward a vision of paradise filled with music and playful lights.
The artworks presented in this exhibition—one of which gives the exhibition its title, and where the video The Room is shown for the first time—offer a glimpse into the last twenty years of the artist’s practice, where his stylized videos move alongside hand-colored images. In these pieces, Nabil applies a meticulous process of painting directly onto the print, transforming each work into a unique object, in the tradition of the Egyptian film posters of his youth. And the same oldest technique of hand-painted photography which is still practiced to this day.
In the end, Nabil reminds us that while life passes with all its uncertainty, images will continue to glow: like scenes that linger long after the film has ended.
