Dalila Hassanein’s practice examines the visual and social patterns embedded in Cairo’s visual landscape. Working across painting and installation, she recontextualises found objects and urban traces–walls, signs, barriers–to explore how formal and informal structures intersect in shaping the city’s identity and rhythm. Her work reflects how people relate to their environment, how objects, public surfaces and signs embody forms of power, memory and expression that often go unnoticed.
The focus of her practice lies in relationships between people and the city, between control and resistance, between what is revealed and what is hidden. These dualities unfold across the city’s surfaces, where layers of paint and writing are continuously covered and rewritten, creating a visual dynamic of both silencing and persistence.
Dalilas’s method involves observing and collecting visual traces from Cairo’s public spaces–murals, scrawls, and found materials–which she then reworks into new compositions. These gestures of reconstruction parallel the city’s own rhythm of constant repair and re-creation and echo the tension between order and improvisation.
Working with painting, found materials, and site-specific installation, Dalila’s recent projects–such as her work for Medrar for Contemporary Art, Cairo–extend her interest in urban structures that choreograph behaviour, exposing how ordinary objects like formal and informal traffic barriers, quietly map the city, creating a balance between fear, control, and obedience.
