Nabil Farag has a background in traditional visual art and obtained his degree from Helwan University in 2014 in Cairo. His experience and practice of painting, sculpture, pottery, design and art pedagogy as well as psychology inform art until today and are at same time areas in which he keeps learning and unlearning. An example of his more traditional practice is a commission for a wall art piece with a size of 800m2. The piece facing the Nile river shows the history of the river, its worshippers and the interaction with the river changed nowadays. Examples of his sculptural practice are renovations of church statues.
With his work titled ‘Tribute to Gibran’ exhibiting quotes of Khalil Gibran, in the form of
photographed installations mixed with calligraphy his artistic practice transformed from a traditional to a more conceptual approach. His photographic practice is self-taught and allowed him eventually to pass on his vast knowledge through many workshops around photography and mixed mediums. His target groups range from young artists to volunteering for children who were victims of human traffickers or of cancer. His social engagement is part of his identity as a person who needs to give back.
After tens of solo and group exhibitions, in 2008 he founded and directed an art space called ‘AFCArt’ A group exhibition with the medium to be a CD format and size he gained a lot of attention from the Egyptian media, who were interested in covering the activities of the art space. He also gave a couple of workshops for visual artists in the space.
When the Egyptian revolution started, his practice tended more to documenting and filming.
Nabil Farag had two exhibitions of his photographs in Italy. Under similar circumstances, he produced and filmed a long documentary named ‘Cairo basement’ about the independent art scene in Cairo during and after the revolution. The film was shown on multiple occasions in Cairo, Frankfurt.
After completing his mandatory military service for thirteen months in 2016/17, it took Nabil Farag to find a way back to his practice. He used his artistic practice to work through his traumatic experiences by investigating the concept of prisons, in two exhibitions during his art residency at ZK/U Berlin. The first tried to find an answer about identity through unlearning the social layers of ‘prisons’ we are in. By abstracting those layers in conversation with the spectators while recording their voiceprint and photographing their portraits, and exposing the developing chemicals to the person’s voice created a new personal identity. The second exhibition at ZK/U was ‘Relics’, an installation in a dark cold basement. Made of a wall where he hid the objects which he collected and hid during his military experience. It also included a written manual from his notes on small pieces of paper ‘since in the military writing (or any form of expression) was forbidden’ about the monthly steps he took to overpass the period of imprisonment without being brainwashed by the regime.
At the moment Nabil Farag is working on the final phase of his investigations into
imprisonment and the social metamorphoses by mixing between photography and oil
painting techniques, such as ‘cyanotype and Alla prima’. Creating new contemporary
paintings, decomposing the human form and building renaissance alike paintings.

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