King of Disco

2011-2012 | Photographic series | 101 x 105 cm each

A photo series picturing the artist’s attempt to reconstruct his personal history by fabricating a pseudo storyboard about a life-changing incident. The incident in question is that of the unsolved murder of his father during the civil war. By photographing scenes from Egyptian films of the time as somehow narrators of these events, thus disembodying them from their original context, the work constantly blurs the lines between the real and the unreal. Because the actual circumstances surrounding the murder were unknown, Yassin was forced to imagine them enmeshed within the dramatic narratives of films he watched, reinventing the story with every new show. Slowly, the real-life tragedy merged with the unfolding cinematic drama, creating new emotional territories with which to imagine reality.

By rewiring the operations of fact and fiction and expanding the threshold between the two, the artist wishes to question what it means to recall history on a personal level, insofar as memory’s distinctive fluctuating quality of distorting, erasing, and transforming real events is just as strong as its perceived fortitude in remembering them.