NEW ADDRESS
- PS² Project Space, 31-35 High Street, BT1 2AB
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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 back burner or an alchemy.
Zein(at), or Lama.
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.
The door was half-open, but the gaze pierced through. How early mornings bear witness.
and, if I’m being honest, my gestures are all inherited.
Anne and Mona, not to forget Noor.
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?
Hireath 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. Hiraeth is a Welsh word that describes a deep, bittersweet longing for home, time or place to which you can never return – or one that may never have existed.
Eslam is an artist from Cairo, now based in Belfast. His work focuses on walking as a pedagogical practice and is centred around the body: the body in motion, in contact with nature, and in the presence of other bodies.
Eslam will exhibit a continuation of this work in progress at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, in December 2026.
More information: https://www.pssquared.org/projects/hiraeth
