"Mannequin in my daydreams, I'm disguised as situations that my realistic self couldn't handle."

Daydreams for me are like masks of tribes, masks worn to control the forces of good and evil or to be able to escape from the enemy, or as a way to bring the spirit of ancestors to help the tribesmen in facing the difficulties of life. The relationship between tribes and the use of masks is an exciting and rich relationship, it is a relationship between man and his reality and his attempt to control this reality and its challenges through his different convictions. This relationship I see also in its personal and private form, represented in my relationship with daydreams.

Six self-portraits in which I appear as a secondary element, a mere mannequin as my real entity and its relation to my daydreams. I attempted to express what daydreams are for me and how I see them as meanings, but in a visual form inspired by the world of tribal masks. Masks I wear when I lose their meaning in real life.

*This project is the result of an invitation from Tam Gallery to participate in a project related to the exhibition theme "Daydream."

These self-portraits, which you see hanging in front of you, were implemented at different times and were not implemented for the purpose of displaying together as one project. The idea of displaying them under the title “From the Self about the Self” came when I looked at these portraits and found a common element between them that did not exist. In the rest of my work, which mainly depends on instant production through improvisation, without thinking in advance about a specific idea or topic that I would like to raise, I leave myself to improvise and respond to the face that I am trying to reformulate through my digital tools, and all this is supported by listening to a piece of music . Music plays a major role in the development and execution of portraiture, as it guides me and my decisions during the process of improvisation and portraiture production.

The common element in these four self-portraits – in addition to the practical style that I mentioned earlier – is the presence of an idea before starting the implementation and it was part of the motivation to work in a specific direction in each portrait and had an impact in coming up with these results in terms of visual formulation.

This project was created for participation in Roznama 8 by Medrar

During the quarantine period I created this project on instrgram under #StayHomeWithAllam hashtag ,started from 23 March – 5 April 2020.

Idea:

The visual content is always the strongest and easiest to remember, so I will daily – Through 14 Day Quarantine- make a portrait of a person from my Instagram list to remind him to stay at home and therefore he will always remember that during these critical days and his loved ones will always be remembered also to stay at home.