Youssef Nabil was born in Cairo in 1972, and has lived and worked in Paris and New York since 2002. He began his photography career in 1992 by staging tableaux in which his friends acted out melodramas recalling film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Later, while he was living in New York and Paris, he began photographing artists and friends, producing both formal portraits as well as placing his subjects in the realms of dream and sleep, pictured on the edge of consciousness and far from their public personas. When he returned to Egypt in 1999, he continued to develop his unique approach to photography in his portraits of writers, singers, and film stars of the Arab world. Nabil’s distinctive technique of hand-colouring silver gelatine photographs involves taking black and white photographs, which are printed deliberately light, then applying watercolor and pencil tints. In recent years, he has started producing self-portraits that reflect his dislocated life away from Egypt. In these liminal scenes tinged with sex and death, he appears lingering between worldly realities and serene dreams, loneliness and fame.
In 2010 Nabil exhibited his first film, You Never Left, an eight-minute piece featuring French actors Fanny Ardant and Tahar Rahim. It is set in an allegorical “other place” that is a metaphor for a lost Egypt. The film’s theme suggests a parallel between exile and death, creating a genuine self-portrait of the Cairo-born artist, at once intimate and solemn. In the film, Nabil reverently and inventively revisits the aesthetic characteristics of Egyptian cinema’s golden age – the stars, the Technicolor, and the type of film stock. Working with film was a major turning point in the career of an artist whose entire body of work until then had been inspired by cinema.
Nabil’s work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at venues in the Middle East, Europe, the United States, Mexico, and Africa. His most recent solo shows include Time of Transformation (2013), The Third Line Gallery, Dubai, U.A.E.; Youssef Nabil (2012), Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; and You Never Left (2011), Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris. Some of the recent group exhibitions including his work are Tea with Nefertiti (2013), Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; and Palmiers, Palms et Palmettes (2013), Musée Matisse at Villa Masséna, Nice, France. His third monograph, Youssef Nabil, was published by Flammarion, Paris, in 2013.
