ESLAM ABD EL SALAM REFLECTS ON HIS RECENT RESIDENCY AT KUNSTVEREIN AUGHRIM.
Director of Kunstverein Aughrim, Kate Strain, got in touch with me last year, through the loveliest email, asking if I was interested in a studio visit, so that she could get to know my practice more. I was filled with excitement, as I find it rare these days that curators would genuinely reach out to artists to have a conversation. It was refreshing to say the least.
Kate mentioned that she was thinking of developing an artist residency programme in Aughrim and asked whether I’d be interested in participating in the pilot programme in summer 2025. In my head, I was already there – in Aughrim and all around County Wicklow. I have only been to the Wicklow Mountains once, back in 2019, and was warned by my friend, Michael, that there was going to be an abundance of light and beauty.
Can you see with your heart? This question sums up my time in Aughrim and is the title of a new body of photographic research, which combines with another ongoing photographic project of mine, called ‘Little Did I Know’. It felt natural and easy to imagine these two projects in communication, almost like a phone call, informing each other about the past and the present.
In ‘Can You See With Your Heart?’ you will find me listening to past conversations that never left me, about the different ways I’m trying to stay in touch with my heart when it comes to seeing. A verse from the Quran became an anchor: “Have they not journeyed through the land, so their hearts may understand, and their ears may listen? Indeed, it is not the eyes that are blind, but it is the hearts within the chests that grow blind.” (22:46)
Personally, that verse has always stuck in my mind, for many reasons, and the more I age, the more it all makes sense. Eyes can be cloudy, judgemental at times, and confused. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the heart won’t fall for the same tropes, but when understood, guarded and gently protected, seeing can become moral and spiritual sustenance for the soul and body. Would you agree that this is our most precious gift?
How the heart sees will lead us to moving as a spiritual process. I have been on the move since last December, not by choice. Five homes, four months; the minute your body settles or tries to recognise the way from your bedroom to the kitchen and other surroundings, it’s time for you to leave. The discomfort, both physical and emotional; the quiet uncertainty that clouds over your days. Those movements – steps in all their metaphorical and literal sense – are a blessing. I saw light I wouldn’t have otherwise had the chance to encounter. The geographical distance at play with each house was so much fun; the way my body ached from carrying bags and holding, releasing breath. The ways in which I felt held by friends. Moving is required, and the flexibility that comes with it is invaluable, mostly to your heart. It’s a long braid and a dialogue that never ends.
At the start of the residency, Kate mentioned that one of the things she connects with most in my photographs is the depiction of the human element as a body of nature. Sitting with her comment was like an opening for me to ask questions about the ‘nature’ that we develop and acquire with time as living, breathing, mobilised bodies.
In one of these photographs, we see an adult called Marc holding a toy horse. Horses, to me, are graceful, sensitive, and utterly divine creatures; every time I encounter one up close or from a distance, my heart just skips a beat. Marc embodies their nature of immense honesty and purity, strength and fragility that you want to hold and shield. When I saw the toy horse in his cottage, and he told me it was a gift from his mother at the age of nine, I smiled at how it all made sense.
To mark the end of my residency, my exhibition, ‘Can You See With Your Heart?’ launched at Kunstverein Aughrim on 27 June, presenting a series of photographs and objects (found, gifted and collected) in a state of mirroring one another. Small echoes of an inner shift; gentle reminders of things felt but rarely seen.
Through the years, certain themes have never left me. They grow with me, and they reform and change as I get older. Home, foreign and familiar to us all, never ceases to reveal dimensions not previously perceived. Family dynamics. The variety of questions asked and raised about synchronicity, time, and fate. Grief and the colours and stages of it. The main pillar of my practice is walking – more specifically and recently, walking as an act of remembrance and how that relates to grief.
Eslam Abd El Salam is an Egyptian visual artist based in Belfast. Through the mediums of analogue photography, polaroid, text, and mixed media, Eslam considers notions of synchronicity, specifically in relation to friendship and serendipitous encounters with others.
@eslamabdelsalam_
Eslam undertook a month-long residency at Kunstverein Aughrim in June as part of Aughrim’s Craic in the Granite Music & Arts Festival 2025, supported by Wicklow County Council Arts Office festival awards, funded through the Arts Council.
kunstverein.ie
