From issue: #24 The Graduate Issue 2024
In the series Our Hidden Room, Mohamed Hassan reflects on the complex yet loving relationship between a father and son – the memory-based, fragmented, and nonlinear story of his own father and himself. Hassan recalls his father’s struggle with bipolar disorder, which became apparent to the artist as an adult, when he looked back on his father’s erratic, reclusive behaviour, and his obsession with the small, dark room hidden in their family home. Hassan’s father suffered from mental health issues which were not fully addressed, and which eventually led to his suicide.
We encounter the father as a young man with a camera via archive images that reveal little of his inner struggle, while Hassan’s experiences are conveyed through photographs taken over the last five years. The artist was born in 1984 in Alexandria but moved to the UK in 2007 and now lives in Wales; in Our Hidden Room he visits both Egypt and his current home, mixing both straight colour and poetic monochrome images. Hassan’s work is a view from the inside and outside, speaking of the conflict of belonging to a diasporic community and of being a visitor to one’s country of birth. Mohamed Hassan studied photography at Carmarthen School of Art before completing an MA in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales in 2023.
