KEEP ME POSTED

A group show with Ebrahim Bahaa-Eldin, Taha Belal, Marianne Fahmy, and Maha Maamoun

21 May - 7 July 2025

For the final show of the season, Gypsum is pleased to present the group exhibition “Keep Me Posted”. This exhibition features works by Ebrahim Bahaa-Eldin, Taha Belal, Marianne Fahmy, and Maha Maamoun, and explores the circulation of written texts and modes of communication—whether personal, literary, or commercial. Spanning film, collage, photography, and print, the artists utilize letters, digital messages, literary sources, and advertisements to engage with how correspondences are mediated and how found texts are transformed into imagery.

Originally conceived as a film, Marianne Fahmy’s 31 Silent Encounters follows a non-linear dialogue drawn from a collection of letters exchanged between imprisoned communist activist Abdel Azim Anis and his wife during his four-year incarceration in the early 1960s. The displayed six film stills presents excerpts from these letters, pairing them with images of Alexandrian architectural facades that echo the places referenced in their correspondences. The work frames the couple’s personal epistolary relationship within the larger context of Egyptian political history while using architecture as an indication of social change. 

In the couple of years following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Maha Maamoun noticed an incessant rise in the appearance of animals in news, talk shows, opinion pieces, literary texts and art projects. These animal appearances appeared to be a function of a collective urge to reflect on, revise, or conversely to re-assert, the status-quo and its catastrophic power relations. Her film Dear Animal focuses on two significant pieces of writing from that period: Sultan Qanun al-Wujud (Lord of the Order of Existence), a short story by Haytham El-Wardany, and a selection of the Facebook notes that director and producer Azza Shaaban was posting to her friends in Egypt, updating them on her state of mind and being in her self-exile in India. In both these texts, animals curiously appeared, not as metaphors, symbols or prosthetic tongues for an endangered political subject, but as indeterminate shifting forms with uncertain beginnings and ends.

Taha Belal’s Unfinished Business (bonjour ok pour demain) combines SMS messages, magazine advertisements and newspaper images on leftover paper. Following his move to France, Belal kept his Egyptian number, where he would receive unsolicited SMSes by Egyptian corporations and messages from Whatsapp groups—forms of correspondence that despite their often ‘personalised’ sentiment, do not provide a sense of reciprocity through their automated nature. Belal takes these images and texts from the various modes of communication and transfers them onto receipts, magazine pages, and carbon copy paper by tracing, doubling, and pressing–transforming these numeric forms into meticulous hand-written iterations.

Ebrahim Bahaa-Eddin’s photographic print Mirrors of the City documents a vacant billboard he would come across, and recurrently return to, in Cairo’s suburban outskirts. Captured at dawn, the wooden structure with its aluminum panels stands on a pile of sand and speaks to no one. The structure–once seemingly unavoidable with its consumerist message–becomes a means to examine the relationship between form and function, especially in public infrastructure. 

“Keep Me Posted” reflects on how language becomes entangled with consumerism, visibility, intimacy, and political history. The works in the exhibition draw from found and circulated texts to explore how communication is mediated, interrupted, and transformed. The films, photographs and collages reframe acts of reading and writing as visual gestures—forms of remembrance, and reinterpretation across media, and historical moments.