With »No Matter How Dim the Light Is« Essa Grayeb returns to the moment of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1967 resignation speech – a defining rupture in modern Arab history that marked a time of profound crisis and loss. For Grayeb this moment becomes a site of mourning, reflecting on the impossibility of grief when images circulate faster than sorrow can settle.
The images on display are three from a series of 12 darkroom prints made by exposing photographic paper – at varying durations – to the light of a television as Nasser’s speech played. The moving images settle into still, fixed imprints: ghosted, blurred surfaces that serve as fragile residues of a transmission once shared by millions. Taking its title from a line in the address, the work also meditates on the persistence of hope in moments of rupture and loss, as well as on the instability of memory across generations.
Essa Grayeb is a 2025/26 Visual Arts fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin-Program.
CTM 2026 Exhibition
24.1. – 22.3.2026 | Free entry
daadgalerie & Kunstraum Kreuzberg