Photographer Ali Zaraay to Host Solo Exhibit at Ubuntu Gallery

More than a decade in the making, Ali Zaraay’s Crawling on the Dust, a documentary photography project, will open to the public on October 28th at Ubuntu Gallery in Zamalek, in an exhibition curated by anthropologist Farah Hallaba.

Since 2015, Ali Zaraay has followed Haj Hani El Sayed’s nomadic Bedouin family across the Nile Delta, documenting how the steady creep of urban expansion has narrowed the lands they once moved through freely. Zaraay has travelled with and followed the family across stretches of land that, as he often describes, are difficult to locate on Google Maps.

In 2024, the project was selected for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass and the Arab Documentary Photography Program, run by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture in collaboration with the Magnum Foundation. Zaraay was also featured on CairoScene and El Fasla’s annual Impact List that year. In February 2024, we also spoke to him at an exhibition during Cairo Design Week, where he shared part of Crawling on the Dust. Now, the project will be presented in full for the first time.

Once proud of their deep knowledge of navigating the land, Haj Hani and his family are increasingly unable to sustain their inherited way of life amid the Delta’s relentless urban expansion. Crawling on the Dust explores what it means to belong to land that is increasingly temporary, tracing the experience of constant movement while considering alternative meanings of the road, imagination and what the project describes as “crawling as a rhythm of resistance”.

The exhibition also examines the relationship between still images and movement, questioning what photography can capture when its subjects are constantly on the move. An accompanying public programme includes an artist-led exhibition tour on October 31st from 4 PM to 6 PM, a children’s tour on November 14th, a reading performance at Al Warsha on November 18th, and a collective deinstallation, with the date yet to be announced.

The exhibition opens on Wednesday, October 28th, at 7 PM.