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Brian Conley

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Brian Conley - "Cairo Oblique," 2014, Series of 80Archival digital prints, 8 x 10.5" each. Ed of 5 + 2 AP, Installation View “In 2014 I was visiting artist in Cairo. I arrived in the aftermath of the Rabaa Massacre, in which 1000 demonstrators protesting President Mohamed Morsi’s overthrow by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi were killed, and 2000 more were injured. Sisi would soon run for President, and his election was already inevitable. Still, in the run-up to voting, the military clamped down. Artists and journalists were suspect, as were many others (between 2013 and 2017, 60,000 people were arrested), and friends told me that I risked arrest if I used camera equipment in public. Frustrated, I began to take photos without looking through the viewfinder, balancing my iPhone unobtrusively on the window ledges of buses and taxis. In five months, I shot 1,418 images. I think of these photographs as having been authored by the agents of constraint—whether that’s the phone, or the militarized state.” (Conley)

“Cairo Oblique,” 2014, Series of 80Archival digital prints, 8 x 10.5″ each. Ed of 5 + 2 AP, Installation View

“In 2014 I was visiting artist in Cairo. I arrived in the aftermath of the Rabaa Massacre, in which 1000 demonstrators protesting President Mohamed Morsi’s overthrow by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi were killed, and 2000 more were injured. Sisi would soon run for President, and his election was already inevitable. Still, in the run-up to voting, the military clamped down. Artists and journalists were suspect, as were many others (between 2013 and 2017, 60,000 people were arrested), and friends told me that I risked arrest if I used camera equipment in public. Frustrated, I began to take photos without looking through the viewfinder, balancing my iPhone unobtrusively on the window ledges of buses and taxis. In five months, I shot 1,418 images. I think of these photographs as having been authored by the agents of constraint—whether that’s the phone, or the militarized state.” (Conley)

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