The Cold is Unbearable this August, a take on fragility and nature. We visited Fares Zaitoon’s exhibition, The Cold is Unbearable this August, curated by Karim El Hayawan. The exhibition is Fares’s take on fragility, embracing a sense of losing direction, allowing meaning to drift between clarity and blur. The photographs capture the remains of chaos and the quitness of stillness together.
The Idea Behind the Exhibition
The project was shot in Denmark in 2021 during the coronavirus lockdown. Fares expresses his emotions through the project. He expresses his disturbances from reality, and what is behind the beauty and ugliness of things.
“The idea all started when I started walking every day through the forests, exploring the new environment around me. This was all new to me, different from the street noise in Cairo I’m used to,” he said.
“I started feeling a sense of derealization. I started trying to describe and find what is real and what is not, and capture their in-between on camera, like a feeling of glitch on a Windows screen,” he adds.
Fares started reflecting on what he sees and what he feels through the project and the environment around him. Through the process, he realized that the photos look a lot like paintings, making The Cold is Unbearable this August a take on fragility and nature.
“We wanted visitors to have an experience in the exhibition. Karim’s curation brought this to light through the dramatic lights and background music.” He adds, “Thanks to our artistic resonance between us, the curation process was easy,” he explains.
Karim El Hayawan
The exhibition is built on conversation, a conversation between Karim El Hayawan and Fares.
“I believe that art is all about conversation. Whether it’s a conversation between a curator and an artist, an artist and an artist, an artist and the audience, the gallery, or the paintings themselves,” Karim reflects.
For Karim, the exhibition expresses inner chaos and the weight we carry.
“The exhibition is all about perception. The way Fares views nature isn’t necessarily how we view it. What is moving is what’s going on in his head, and that’s what he expresses in the photos. He wasn’t as interested in the way the photos would turn out as much as he was interested in how he was feeling while taking them,” he adds.
Hopes Visitors To Feel
“What Fares felt. To feel that there’s so much power in letting go and sometimes being lost,” Karim hopes for visitors to feel,
Fares expresses that he is happy that the exhibition is finally out after four years. The whole process was an expression of his raw feelings during the time he spent in Denmark.
“I’m happy that people get to see it, to feel what i felt what i felt at the time. To question whether these are paintings or photographs. How are these photographs?” he shares.
The Artists
Fares Zaitoon is a self-taught visual and performing artist. His work often addresses issues such as addiction and mental illness, translating raw experiences into visual language.
Karim El Hayawan is an interior architect and photographer. He found his passion in street photography and portraiture. He is the founder of Cairo Saturday Walks, an initiative that invites participants to explore different neighborhoods in Egypt.