2-channel video installation, 7 min. Arabic, English.
Article 9303 is an Egyptian legal document that defines the technical standards on machine-readable passports and passport photography. The document acts as an archived visual record of the international agreement. It serves as an authoritative object for communicating how visual records of the human body should be produced and archived.
Through interviews with two photographers, one working in the embassy district of Cairo and producing mostly passport photographs, the other a photographer of official functions and meetings at the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization), the institution which issued Document 9303, the two-channel video installation investigates the labor of these workers and the agency that they have over the capturing of specific moments. These two photographers compare their relation to the camera and the body. Both the studio and the meeting room serve as a type of stage in which “actors” pose and perform still bodily gestures for the viewership of an audience, be that audience human or machine.
Ash Moniz, born in 1992 in Wawa, Canada, grew up in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and Casablanca, Morocco and is currently based in Cairo. He is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work spans the realms of performance, video, and installation, focusing primarily on transportation logistics and the archiving of citizenship. He holds a BFA from OCAD University (Toronto, 2014) and has participated in the Mass Alexandria Independent Studio Program (Alexandria, 2016). Moniz has exhibited at galleries and museums internationally and received awards. Currently he is a fellow at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS), leading a course on performativity.
