This series addresses absence and presence as shifting and interlocking nodes of queer experience that cannot be mapped onto a progressive politic of visibility, where mundane spaces and objects in my and my partner’s home create embodied absences as well as embody lingering presences related to our careful navigations of the private sphere in Cairo. Inspired by Tina Campt’s work on stillness/stasis, absence)/(presence refuses the straightforward visibility of queer persons at different positions of precarity to state regimes and instead engages an alternate sensory arrangement to bodily-optical tactics of the hetero/militaristic. Here, scenes of care and intimacy do not call on a promised humanity but rather refute the structures ensuring such a promise is never fulfilled.
