Aaru (2022) is a photomontage series by the Egyptian photo artist Nermine Hammam (b. 1967). It uses the ancient Egyptian belief in the soul’s journey after death to Aaru, or paradise, as a guiding metaphor for a visceral, at times disturbing self-portrait. Taken together, the twenty-two images that make up this series plot Hammam’s descent from a state of “quiet” contemplation, and memories revisited, to an irresistible outpouring of anger and grief. Aaru is a work about a father, now deceased, and about masculinity, or, more precisely, that excess of masculine energy that tips “the world off its center” and has shaped the artist’s life in significant ways.1Aaru captures both “a state of mourning and an act of purging. It is a cry for help and a search for release; a purging of memories that can no longer be endured.” In ancient Egyptian cosmology, the heart of the deceased was weighed against an ostrich feather; souls whose hearts tipped the cosmic scales were devoured by a mythical monster; souls whose hearts maintained the balance of the scales were permitted to embark on the perilous journey through the underworld to Aaru. In her work Hammam struggles against a world of darkness where the scales are “out of tilt”; she invokes that ancient journey of the soul as a metaphor for the mind’s inner voyage “from a state of trauma and darkness towards the stillness of being and inner peace.”Aaru takes as its “trigger” a series of black-and-white images from the 1930s of men lounging on beaches in Egypt’s coastal city Alexandria. Through a process of digital layering that is the hallmark of Hammam’s practice, these appropriated family photographs “are ripped open to expose the pain that they conceal.” The men in these images are stripped of all identifying features, their faces obscured with strange masks or disfigured by oversized, devouring mouths. They are uprooted from their original beach setting and transported into a dystopian landscape, “a timeless no man’s land where traumas are perpetually relived.” Fragile and incongruous in their wet bathing suits, arms and legs exposed, they pose for the camera, oblivious to the desolation that surrounds them. At times Hammam seems to empathize with these figures “that posture and smile to hide their vulnerability,” yet equally she resents them and their refusal to yield to the disfiguring violence inflicted on them. They stand as archetypes, or totemic representations, of the pain and horror that is the subject of this work.In ancient Egyptian mythology, Aaru is a place of eternal pleasure that awaits souls that complete a journey through the gates of the underworld. In Hammam’s work, her childhood memories of Alexandria are posited as “a journey towards an Aaru of sorts, a mythical place that lives in the collective consciousness of Egyptians as a space of joy and abandon that is entirely unrelated to the reality of the decaying, modern city.”For Hammam, the loss of Aaru is a state of disorientation or self-delusion that is also a state of exile from “the homeland” of the self. This longing for a lost and unattainable Eden is echoed, throughout Aaru, in the fragments of text by the Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish, who uses Palestine as a metaphor for the loss of Eden and the anguish of dispossession. “We cling to fabricated versions of our past to give meaning to the present,” she explains. “Yet, true salvation, or Aaru, is a place of stillness beyond all narratives; a place that can only be arrived at through a perilous inward journey to confront the darkness that is at our core.”In a quasi-ritualistic process that strives to “bypass the intellect and tap directly into the subconscious,” Hammam “peels back,” one by one, the images with which she has constructed her identity as a woman and artist. Distorted family photographs of Alexandria collide with defaced images of her own father and a decapitated Christ, alongside lines of Arabic text and references to iconic Western artists, such as René Magritte, Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Nancy Spero, who have profoundly shaped her artistic practice. Hammam “captures” her male protagonists within these whirling images of her inner world, even as she acknowledges the futility of any constructed notions of the “self”: “In the end, things only carry the meanings that we give them; that which we mistake for truth, all those supporting pillars of our worldview, are really only projections of the mind.”Shadow of the Fish-Head is a “talismanic” work that strives for balance in the face of a dark, devouring energy (fig. 1). A male figure reclines in the foreground of a barren landscape, his relaxed, playful posture contrasting with a menacing form rising from within him. Its masklike jaws distort his features, its limbs reach down into his body. A photograph of the same man, smiling on a beach, appears above the distorted, hybrid figure, who is now unrecognizable. Hammam’s reference to Magritte’s Le rêve de l’androgyn strikes a note of balance that diffuses the horror in this work. In Magritte’s image, two sleeping mermaids are suspended, one above the other: one consists of a woman’s body and a fishtail, while the other, her exact opposite, features a fish head with a woman’s torso and limbs. Together they represent the equilibrium that Hammam is invoking here; their presence suggests that the dark monster inside the male figure is as integral to his being as his smiling “public” self so long as these opposing states are kept in balance.In Shadow of the Fish-Head small, perpendicular rectangles “hold” these individual images in place like snippets of transparent tape in a family scrapbook. Barely visible within the rectangles are the words of Mahmoud Darwish: “Between my name and I are vast expanses.” Darwish is quoted again in the work: “Words have dispossessed me.” This inclusion of Palestinian poetry, transcribed in the artist’s own handwriting, introduces a complex metaphor. In these lines Darwish invokes the notion of exile as a profound loss of self. By including his words alongside fragments of iconic Western art, Hammam is staging a further “dislocation” of her own, decontextualizing these fragments and reconfiguring them into new compositions, where they lose any original context and meaning; “now these fragments of Western culture are intelligible only through an Arabic text that dictates a new reading of the work.” With this gesture Hammam invokes “that process of cultural colonization, articulated by writers such as Darwish, by which the identity of a politically occupied people is erased and reconstituted by that of the occupier.” In Colliding Particles two men pose for the camera surrounded by women’s severed heads and blood spatter. Images of hyenas prowl this work below a line of handwritten Arabic text that pleads, “I am I, are you you?” “In this state of exile from the self,” Hammam explains, “any notion of identity becomes shifting and contingent, endlessly reinvented by power and circumstance.”Though Hammam returns again and again to her central message “like the mind revisiting a trauma that is impossible to exorcise,” the individual images that make up Aaru vary markedly in aesthetic style. In the first works created for this series, Hammam harnesses elements of graphic design, such as repeated floral motifs, in a “restrained” style reminiscent of her earlier practice. The horror in these works is examined without ever escaping her full control. In Tehom Heroes a photograph of young men posing for the camera, dated 1932, is distorted by a shadowy and barely discernable presence. In Clearing Unity the figure of a young man in a bathing costume lounges delicately on craggy rocks, surrounded by a border of cascading floral motifs. The man’s features are distorted by a large devouring mouth that contrasts with his effeminate pose. “I was always trying to please and felt I was being devoured by the demands of others,” notes Hammam of this work.Then, in what Hammam describes as a “sudden turn, halfway through the series,” these carefully crafted compositions give way to works that “rage” with decontextualized images and fragments of handwritten text colliding in a process she describes as “having a tantrum on the canvas.” The overall effect is that of “a painful abscess,” she explains, “that is prodded and examined only to burst, releasing a pent-up torrent that takes on a force of its own: it is like a descent from the quiet contemplation of old traumas to an uncontrolled rage triggered by the memories revisited . . . as though I lose my concern with the other’s gaze; it is an expression of feeling trapped, but also an act of defiance and of unchaining myself.”Two works that capture this marked transition are The Gatekeeper’s Truth, the very first image created by Hammam and her “entry point into Aaru,” and Posturing Bravado . . . Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?, one of the last. Each image embodies, in its own way, the meaning and purpose of Aaru much “as a single atom contains within it a microcosm of the entire universe.” In The Gatekeeper’s Truth a young man, dressed in a 1930s bathing suit, is flanked by a shadow with masklike features that embraces him from behind (fig. 2). The light creases on the man’s clothing intimate the fingermarks of the looming presence by his side. The original beach setting of the family photograph is gone; instead, the young man appears incongruous and vulnerable with his wet bathing suit and rigid, formal pose. By contrast, his shadowy alter ego seems entirely composed; the young man’s furtive, darting gaze contrasts with the blank, expressionless surface of the mask, its eyes closed in deep repose. In this image Hammam reinterprets the fourth-dynasty statue of the enthroned pharaoh, Chephren, held in an eternal embrace by the falcon god, Horus. In contrast to this ancient symbol of the inseparable nature of kingship and the divine, the young man and his shadow present a far less confident worldview. Hammam’s modern-day hieroglyph invites us to journey beyond an obsessive need for meaning and a “noisy” preoccupation with the world—to strive for Aaru, or transcendence, by confronting the darkness that lies within.Perhaps the most powerful work in the series, Posturing Bravado . . . Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? is a searing self-portrait as Hammam reflects on her childhood (fig. 3). Where The Gatekeeper’s Truth consists of a single graphic image on a background of block color, Posturing Bravado is a whirling space of archival photographs and handwritten text colliding with blood marks and the cropped images of severed heads. The key to this work lies in Darwish’s words transcribed in Hammam’s own hand, “I see that which I wish to see of death”; this text appears alongside the image of Hammam as a young child, looking down at her seated father, whose face is turned away. The meaning of the work emanates from this one point as Hammam probes her relationship with her deceased father and her unresolved feelings following his death. In an upper corner the international symbol of womanhood hovers as a faint and barely decipherable key of life. “Clouds” of angry and illegible scrawl appear in the image, like that of a child struggling to express a trauma far greater than a young vocabulary can encompass. In form the scrawled lines echo the bloodlike splatters that punctuate the work. Like the young man and his dark shadow, the position of the child, standing legs askance, is one of postured confidence; etched lines layered onto the surface of the image, beside her, seem to intimate an angel’s wing. In direct symmetry with the girl, a Christ figure presides over severed heads of women that reference Spero’s work; bloody handprints denote, at once, the violence perpetrated against these women and the desperate traces they leave behind. For this is both a work of powerlessness and of agency, of perpetrators and their victims, and of posturing bravado to hide pain and fragility. In this work Hammam grieves for her past vulnerability even as she rages against it. It is a cry of anguish in a world where a Christlike figure presides over carnage it is powerless to prevent. At the bottom of this image the ubiquitous male bather of Aaru sits perched on a rocky outcrop, his disfigured face mirroring those of the unavailable father and the powerless child in a totemic representation of the sublimated violence that is the subject of this work. Hammam explains: “This work denotes a state of desperation; I am desperate for meaning, holding onto anything that comes my way—any images or text—and putting them together until I find meaning. Driving this process is something intangible, a goal that I cannot articulate but need to reach. To get there, I am like a person drowning who thrashes about for something to hold on to.”Like Posturing Bravado . . . Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? Hammam’s Destroyer of Manifest is a work of anguish and outrage against that preponderance of masculine energy in the world that manifests as an absence of compassion and empathy; against “a force that consumes and destroys all that is less powerful than itself.” The images that constitute Destroyer of Manifest resonate with sublimated aggression: a trophy hunter poses neatly alongside the body of the rhinoceros that he has killed in sport; young boys playfight on a beach in 1930s Egypt. Their empty posturing is accentuated by a faceless figure performing a handstand at the center of the work. Bloody stains and handprints reinscribe back onto these images the violence that is hidden behind a sanitized veneer. The bestial instincts that lurk behind the decorum peek forth in the protruding orifice that appears next to the “fighting” boys, a tribute to Bacon’s animal paintings. Darwish’s lament “My father, my father” and “to my father, to my father” reminds us of the complex symbolism associated with the paternal figure, in Aaru, who signifies at once the “absent savior” and a perpetrator from whom we need saving.The background of this work is dominated by the large mythological eagle that tears out the liver of the dismembered Prometheus in a cycle of eternal retribution. Every night Prometheus’s liver regrows so that in the morning he may be tortured anew; this cycle of perpetual pain is mirrored in the Arabic text that is circular in form and consists of repeated words and phrases. Significantly, this handwritten text is frail and barely intelligible, like the whispering of a small child; angry, childlike scrawl interrupts the text in parts, as though words have failed to encompass the magnitude of the trauma being recounted. Repetition in the text invokes cries of anguish and of memories endlessly revisited. Darwish’s line “I shall not return, I will not return, I return” captures this cycle of mental anguish, “the effort to escape, even as one is drawn back in.” A repeated “No. No. No” suggests both desperation and resistance. It resonates with “the desire to put an end to suffering by rising above the hell of personal history and reaching for meaning in the transcendental.”In a gesture to the tomb walls of ancient Egypt, Hammam unfolds her meaning in these works cumulatively and along horizontal “registers,” or levels, using highly personal images and symbols. This is particularly evident in Narcissus Drowning, where the images are laid out like a collage in a family album (fig. 4). In the top left-hand corner the symbol of the feminine appears again, this time positioned in precise symmetry with an image of Narcissus staring at his own reflection. A childlike pencil sketch of a staircase leads us down from here to Giorgio de Chirico’s Horse with Riders (1934), where a horse, feminized and voluptuous in form, is being tamed by the smaller figure of a naked man. A large red bloodstain guides us along to an image of Hammam herself as a young woman riding a horse, in an unmistakable parallel to de Chirico’s steed. The hand of a smiling male bather finally points us down to a “decorative border” of drowning female figures drawn from Spero’s work. This descent into oblivion is presided over by a black bull in a tribute to Basquiat’s work Beef Ribs Longhorn (1982). Removed from its original context, Basquiat’s bull is repurposed as a hieroglyph of sorts and now denotes the ancient Egyptian deity Apis.Narcissus Drowning invokes Ovid’s tale of the goddess Echo, who is deprived of the power of original speech and doomed forever to echo the words of others. “To me, the tale of Echo and Narcissus invokes the idea of losing one’s agency and voice in a world absorbed by its own reflection,” explains Hammam. This notion is captured in the Arabic lines by Darwish, “I gift you my memory,” repeated several times in the work. “One becomes so distanced from oneself,” Hammam says, “that even personal memories are commodities to be handed over in supplication.” Narcissus Drowning is perhaps the most “optimistic” of the works in Aaru. After all, Ovid’s tale sees Narcissus drown in his own reflection, suggesting that a system unable to encompass “the other” is ultimately doomed to fail. Moreover, if we interpret Narcissus Drowning as reenactment of the journey to the afterlife, as depicted on ancient tomb walls, then the message is indeed hopeful: “Perhaps the act of drowning in this work is also a rebirth, or a rite of passage, towards something far greater and more profound; like a point of departure from one state of ‘being in the world’ through trauma and grief, on to that stillness of mind that is Aaru.”For Hammam this quest for Aaru is precarious and uncertain; it is an inward journey to confront that darkness that is at our very core and is perhaps more profoundly “true” than the ever-shifting narratives by which we present ourselves in the world. Despite the repeated references to violence in the work, Aaru holds out the possibility of spiritual liberation. For Hammam, the key is not to meet your aggressor on his chosen field of battle but to confront that part of him that resides within you and to transcend it in search of peace. “Like souls passing through gates of the underworld,” Hammam explains, “there is the possibility of salvation in this work, there is a ‘oneness,’ something intangible beyond the images; but the journey to reach this must be hard and the gift at the end not easy to attain.”