Eslam’s work focuses on walking as a pedagogical practice and is centered around the body in motion, in contact with nature and the presence of other bodies. Through the mediums of analogue photography, text and mixed media, Eslam considers notions of synchronicity, specifically in relation to friendship and serendipitous encounters.

You have your mother’s eyes 

// 

I have been noticing distance, day in and day out, 

few and far in between. As one does. 

I journal about it, go for a walk or take a nap and it’s either on the backburner or an alchemy. 

Zein(at), or Noor. 

You have your mother’s eyes as you have been told. 

The project is an effort to understand – for lack of a better word – distance and politics and psychogeography, the physicality and the emotion of it.

A visual ode to motherly care and labour that lives and breathes miles away, 

by the bridge that is built at birth/ 

by the narrative maintained with our phone calls/ 

by the walk that dismantles the border/ 

by the novelty of the hope/ 

by the plans stuttering the throat/ 

writing “to” gets me closer and “in between” makes it all worthwhile. 

A visual ode to motherly care and labour that lives and breathes miles away, by the bridge that is built at birth/ 

by the narrative maintained with our phone calls/ 

by the walk that dismantles the border/ 

by the novelty of the hope/ 

by the plans stuttering the throat 

writing “to” gets me closer and “in between” makes it all worthwhile. 

The muscles you’re gaining are all memory cells, or notes. What traces does absence leave us?

You have your mother’s eyes is a collection of prose, imagery and objects that morphs into an installation about and for home. Work in progress that forms a wider investigation about displacement, care, distance and belonging.

Eslam is an artist from Cairo, now based in Belfast. Through analogue photography, polaroids, text and mixed media, Eslam considers notions of synchronicity, specifically in relation to friendship and serendipitous encounters. 

Eslam recently undertook a residency at Tsarino Foundation, Bulgaria. He is a selected artist for FUTURES 2026 European Photography Platform (PhotoIreland, Dublin) and has exhibited in recent years at Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry, Catalyst Arts and Kunstverein Aughrim. Eslam will exhibit a continuation of this work in progress at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, in November 2026