Passed by Hands – Exhibition by Zahraa El Alfy and Najla Said

“Passed by Hands” brings together works by Zahraa El Alfy and Najla Said, presenting food as both archive and action; a material language through which communities recall their memory, in a time of transformations that reorder priorities in favor of individualism at the expense of collective continuity. Food and cooking form ecological systems of communal exchange, structures through which societies reproduce themselves, preserve their memory, and negotiate collective survival. Care thus emerges as foundational infrastructure; through proximity, commitment, continuity, and stewardship—as social and political conditions—collective life sustains itself.

In her work He Who Eats Alone, Surely — If Not Now, Then Eventually — Chokes, Zahraa constructs a functional and symbolic kitchen in which cooking appears as a political and social practice rooted in religious, familial, and communal occasions in Cairo. The work draws on the memory of food prepared in abundance as a collective response to scarcity, reflecting on contexts in which care functioned as a natural and non-negotiable condition, where acts of preparing, hosting, giving, and showing up formed part of everyday routine.

The work examines the possibility of sustaining these structures when giving is not met with return, and when the future cannot be secured, demonstrating how care requires sustained effort and presence, even when it exhausts those who carry it out. At a time when relationships conditioned by utility are rewarded and giving becomes risky, the continuation of daily labor keeps collective life intact.

In her project What Remains at the Table, Najla Said begins from a personal memory: the smell of fenugreek that takes her back to Friday mornings in Cairo, when her father prepared eggs with bastirma. She later realizes that this everyday dish carries traces of a shared Armenian history, crossing geographical boundaries and memory.

Najla employs manual photographic printing techniques and experimental materials such as anthotype, cyanotype, chlorophyll printing, cyanolumen, and silver halide emulsion. She approaches photography as a process akin to cooking—one that requires time and transformation. Some images fade or shift over time, foregrounding fragility and impermanence as part of the work’s understanding of the photographic image. The project also reflects on traditional food practices in rural Armenia as acts that preserve knowledge within the home, conceived as a space where food is grown, fermented, dried, and shared in a daily continuity that sustains collective memory. The project was developed during the CROSS-LOOKING residency in Yerevan.

“Passed by Hands” is presented within the second edition of Walima: The Cosmology of Art and Food, curated by Mohamed AboGabal and Melanie Partamian. The program offers a diverse range of events exploring the relationship between artistic practices and food as a concept carrying cultural meanings and social connections, Addressing cooking as a creative act intersecting with the arts, opening space for experimentation and interaction between them as cultural and social tools.

(CROSS-LOOKING: East–West Artistic Residencies) is a collaboration between NOOR, Organ Vida International Photography Festival, the National Gallery of Armenia, Université Paris Cité, Unione della Romagna Faentina, and Università Iuav di Venezia. The project is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme under project number 101174138 — CROSS-LOOKING.

The exhibition runs from March 8 to 17, 2026, daily except Friday and Saturday, from 7:30 to 10:30 PM.

Medrar, 10 Gamal El-Din Abou El-Mahasen Street, 8th Floor, Garden City, Cairo.

The exhibition runs until Tuesday, March 17, 2026, daily except Friday and Saturday, from 7:30 to 10:30 PM.