Heba Y. Amin

The artwork The Devil’s Garden by Heba Y. Amin was part of the exhibition Tell me about ~~yesterday~~ tomorrow (Nov. 28, 2019 until Oct. 18, 2020).

Heba Y. Amin (born in Cairo in 1980) grounds her work in extensive research that looks at the convergence of politics, technology, and architecture. Techno-utopian ideas, as manifested in the mechanisms of colonial soft power, are at the heart of Amin’s practice. Through her work, she highlights the failures of the nation-state paradigm and the technological violence nurtured by nationalisms. Starting from the idea that landscape is an expression of political power structures, Heba Y. Amin questions and reconfigures the tactics and technologies utilized by hegemonic power. Through art, she attempts to subversively transform reality and redefine spaces.

The Devil’s Garden, 2019

During WWII, the North African desert set the backdrop for a power struggle over colonies between European armies. The Devil’s Garden explores narratives related to the German Africa Corps and their lingering presence in northern Egypt. Through trajectories marked by colonial warfare and failed political movements in North Africa, Heba Y. Amin examines the use of technologies for hegemonic power and the technofossils they leave behind. In her most recent work, she looks at the story of a Nazi pyramid located in El Alamein, commemorating a WWII German fighter pilot dubbed The Star of Africa. Her work reveals the story of modern technological progress as one of empire and colonial exploitation, and examines the concepts of domination and authoritarianism exercised through technology. The Devil’s Garden uncovers the residue of European ideologies and the associated repercussions for local populations impacted by conflicts that were never theirs.