Missing Dog

2009

The work is about the dogs in the streets of Egypt and what is happening

in their life around the streets of Cairo, the streets of the big city. When

I came to work at the Townhouse Gallery in 1998 there were always dogs

around. They would hang around for a few months and then go away

again, then someone found another dog somewhere else and brought it

to the street where it would stay for while – the same story all over again.

One night going to the gallery late I saw a man come out in street and give food to the dogs. Then in one minute the dogs started barking and one by one they died – this was a hard and sad thing to watch. I started arguing with the man but then a friend told me that he was State police and that

he came here to do this every month. It was a pitiful sight to see the dogs

lying dead in the street like that. Nobody cared or said anything against

this - it was like the dogs were nothing.

This incident gave me the idea of creating a dog from various things I found

in the streets where the dogs live and sleep. I collected trash for 5 days and

spent three days putting it all together. When the work was finished I put

itout in the street, mounting the big dog behind a fence to make it look like it was in a cage. Photos were taken of the work on the opening night of the Streets of Cairo exhibition as people came to see the work of the partici-pating artists. When we finished we all went home.

The next day I came back to the street outside the Townhouse Gallery

and couldn’t find the dog. I started asking people in the street, in the coffee

shop and the parking place what had happened, and after talking to them

for two hours they told me that the police had come late at night and

destroyed it bit by bit and then taking it away in a garbage truck. The

same truck they remove the dead dogs in.

After a few hours we came up with the idea of making a poster of the

missing dog. The poster showing a photo of the work encouraged people

to call my number if they found the missing dog promising a reward of

EGP 500 to the person who found it. Many people called not understanding the idea of the dog on the poster, as they thought it was a real dog,

not seeing the dog from the collected trash. The poster was mounted everywhere in Downtown Cairo, just like someone would do if they had

lost their beloved pet.