Image: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
‘The City and the City’ is Egyptian artist Rafik Greiss’s first institutional solo exhibition and the premiere of a newly commissioned film. The exhibition will run from 17 October 2026 to 10 January 2027 at KW Institute for Contemporary Art.
At the center of ‘The City and the City’ is Greiss’s newly commissioned film of the same title. The work is conceived as a cinematic essay.
Greiss works across film, photography and sculpture, considering time not as a linear movement from past to present but as something composed of fragments. These moments accumulate, dissolve and may unexpectedly resurface as sensation or afterimage.
His practice spans digital and analog processes and moves between the distant and the proximal at once. It reflects more broadly on transformation, memory and the shifting states of images and objects. The film follows enigmatic figures inhabiting vast desert landscapes, watching and waiting for something that seems yet to happen.
Greiss is an Egyptian artist based in Paris, France, and Cairo, Egypt. The exhibition’s curators are Emma Enderby and Liberty Adrien, with Lara Scherrieble as assistant curator.
