Review: Lara Baladi’s Cosmovision is Suspended Between Memory and Myth

Lara Baladi’s last name straddles a dialogical tension: while it means “my country” or “belonging” in Arabic, it is also used snobbishly to describe something as “unsophisticated”, “kitschy”, or “lower-class”. It is precisely at this crux that her photographs operate—somewhere between daily life and its detritus, history and pop culture, document and dream, fact and fable.

Cosmovision, at the photography gallery Tintera, marks the Egyptian-Lebanese self-taught artist, educator, and archivist’s first show in Cairo since her return nine years ago. The exhibition forms a constellation of over 100 standalone and photomontage works—many never before seen—shot across Gaza, Japan, Mali, Cairo, Lebanon, England, and Pakistan between 1996 and 2011, with a handful extending beyond this period.

Instead of the monumental works she’s best known for, Cosmovision turns to the images on the periphery of her practice. Aside from two large photomontages that act as bookends to the exhibition, the show is a sprawling photographic collage of postcard prints tacked to the wall, sweeping gridded storyboard sequences, framed Polaroid prints, meticulously organised TIFF scans–all outtakes, snapshots, visual notes and encounters that have shaped her early photographic language that have until now been omitted from her artistic practice.

“A moment only has meaning in relation to all moments—we are but fragments devoid of meaning unless we connect them to other fragments.” reads a quote by Baladi on the wall near the show’s entrance. Her individual photographs operate almost like an alphabet: an accumulation of parts that gain meaning only when rearranged, resequenced, and placed in relation to one another. These images move across chronology and geography, forming the foundations of her wider cosmology. 

A portrait of Baladi by Youssef Nabil greets visitors at the show’s entrance. Hand-painted in his signature style, she stands atop a couch among mannequin heads and decorative furniture, a feathered fan raised as if announcing her return to Cairo from Paris—inviting you into her universe, and upon her quest shaped by passion, spirituality, and the surreal. It marks a moment of reintegration: a Christian Arab finding her footing in the city after years abroad, arriving in the midst of personal loss with the death of her grandfather. This period is also defined by witnessing the seismic shifts of the early 2000s—from Israel’s 2006 war on southern Lebanon to the mounting pressures that would culminate in the Egyptian revolution of 2011, quietly echoed in the exhibition by a January 25 poster. 

Disfigured dolls, Ghanaian banknotes, New Year’s parties, balloons caught on ornate stucco ceilings, faded religious posters, and paradisal wallpapers crowd Baladi’s frames. Barbie stickers are pasted beside pious figures in prayer; family meals mirror family portraits; costumed manga-inspired characters drift through rooms punctured by online images files of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Each image has been selected through years of slow, meticulous archiving—negatives catalogued, contact sheets annotated, images sorted by place, year, and encounter.

Baladi belongs to the generation suspended between analogue and digital photography. Although rooted in the sensuousness of analogue—35mm film, chromatic printing with celluloid, and dark room techniques—she simultaneously confronted the abrupt shift to digitality: low-resolution images, limited access to computers, and a scarcity of photo labs in late ’90s Cairo. Enlargements were nearly impossible, making the 10 × 15 cm postcard print the foundational unit of her practice.Working within these technical constraints, Baladi sought ways to move beyond the photographic frame. 

During her time photographing on Youssef Chahine’s film sets, including A l-M assi r (1997), she found that film liberated her from the singular frame and she could experiment with storyboards and panoramic sequences. But it was following her encounter with David Hockney’s collage experiments in which she adopted the postcard, not to mimic the wandering eye, but to construct her own mythology. Her postcard prints became characters, landscapes, and storylines—costumed figures made from cheap props, symbols drawn from pop iconography, everyday objects recast into archetypes.

Her photomontage work Oum El Dounia (2000) exemplifies this unbinding from traditional photographic constraints. Commissioned by Fondation Cartier to mark 200 years since the invention of photography, the work departs from Orientalist desert imagery and early postcard traditions to reimagine the desert as lived space rather than an exotic backdrop. Through hundreds of painstakingly arranged postcard prints, she reconstructs a scene of the third day of creation from Genesis, when land and sea were separated. But Baladi rewrites the scene with a delirious, dreamlike charm. 

An Alice-in-Wonderland-style tea party spills across the dunes: figures are dressed in top hats, fairy wings, pyjamas, and mermaids in cheap outfits and synthetic wigs. Clocks and sunflowers lie scattered like memento moris, while the remains of campfires and tinfoil from late-night barbecues glint in the blinding midday sun. A man walks a rooster on a leash amidst the pharaonic symbols drawn into the sand under a sky composed of underwater images. There is no perspective, no shadow to ground the viewer—only a meticulously constructed scene that drifts somewhere between myth and mirage. 

One standalone image in the exhibition, titled Who Is And Who Was And Who Is To Come, is a trifacial representation of the Holy Trinity shot in Perugia, Italy—Jesus with three faces. For Baladi, this figure becomes more than an icon; it embodies the act of looking back and looking forward at once, the necessity of reading the past to make sense of the future. It is this way of seeing runs through her wider practice.

As a founding member of the Arab Image Foundation in 1997—whose work has long been central to building models for digitising and preserving regional photographic archives—Baladi has long been steeped in questions of memory, preservation, and access. This extends into her later platforms such as Vox Populi (a constellation of media initiatives, artworks, publications, and an open-source timeline drawn from the web archives of the 2011 Egyptian revolution) and Anatomy of a Revolution (an artistic and pedagogical project that breaks down the vocabulary of uprisings). This archival sensibility permeates Cosmovision: the careful recording of moments, the insistence on continuously rendering the fragment as part of a whole.

Baladi’s Relative Destinies, from her series Diary of the Future, offers sixteen gridded tasseographic images that draw us into the obscured abyss of overturned cups of traditional Turkish coffee—left to drip into their saucers, tracing delicate rivulets of residue. It is a superstitious ritual for some, a spiritual language for others, and for many simply a pattern to be ignored. Yet as the potent cultural ritual demands, we turn our cups over, searching the sediments for answers folded into the everyday. Baladi’s work becomes a similar kind of map—not didactic, but instinctive, curious, and attuned to quiet revelation.