Cairo Photo Week: Art as a bridge

Mada

20-05-2025

Sarah Rifky's reflections on Cairo Photo Week strike a nerve. She exposes the scaffolding beneath the spectacle: financial imaginaries, downtown's rebranding, and the choreography of gentrification disguised as art. This is a necessary critique that refuses to look away.
But I want to offer a companion lens, not to contradict hers, but to reframe the question. What if the value of an event like this isn't in its resistance, but in its reach? Not in how loudly it shouts, but in what quiet it manages to disturb.
Cairo Photo Week, for all its contradictions, built a bridge: between publics that rarely meet. Not just the critics and cultural theorists Rifky speaks for, but a different crowd entirely: educators, young professionals, cultural workers, curious city-dwellers. People adjacent to the discourse but rarely invited inside. They may not speak the language of dissent, but they came. They listened. And in a city where access is often gated, that matters.
Yes, the venues bore the marks of gentrification. Yes, some panels unfolded in English. Yes, the scaffolding is tangled with state power. These tensions are real. But so is what happened inside the rooms: artists showing urgent work; audiences encountering unease; questions asked without answers handed down.
Perhaps the more pressing question isn't whether this festival resisted enough, but whether we've made resistance the only valid frame. Who decides what counts as resistance, and to what? And what do we miss when we demand that every gesture declare itself oppositional?
If art only ever preached to the converted, it would forfeit the possibility of transformation. Sometimes, art must also lure. It must seduce before it unsettles. If the polish brought people in, maybe the work kept them there, with its friction, its refusal to resolve.
Maybe this event wasn't perfect. But it wasn't hollow either. Many of its artists in fact refused the spectacle. Mahmoud Talaat's lens turns Cairo's margins into fact, not metaphor; unflinching in its gaze at decay and displacement. Menna Salah peers through lace and gesture to reveal intimacy as something unstable, masked, or momentarily real. Amr Fayek softens the city into a dream, his blurred, spectral frames less documentary than emotional residue. In a space serving iced-lattes during panels on image-making, their work smoldered quietly.
These pieces did not perform resistance. They practiced attention.
Rifky is right to name what's missing. But I want to name what appeared: the trace of a different politics, one rooted in patience, permeability, and presence. Because if we believe art must always confront power, we risk overlooking what it means to reach people, across class, context, and conviction. And if we lose faith in the power of art itself, then what are we asking it to do? A surface doesn't crack without pressure. So perhaps the success of the festival lies not in its polish, but in its fracture. In the presence of contradiction. In the fact that some of us left wondering: Who was in the room? Who wasn't? And who is being engaged, not just staged?
Because art, if it means more than rebellion, must sometimes be a bridge: between critique and curiosity, the already-awake and the newly-stirring. Not instead of politics, but as one of its quieter forms.