Noha Mokhtar & Sahar Suliman “Saga—Mythology of departure” at Halle Nord, Genève

Since 2015, Noha Mokhtar (*Geneva, lives and works between Zurich, Cairo and the United States) and Sahar Suliman (*Cairo, lives and works between Geneva, Cairo and Vaugondry) have been interviewing Egyptian men and women of different generations and socio-economic backgrounds about their experiences within their families. Based on these interviews, they created six characters—the six members of a fictional family that we discover in a newly created video installation. Marking their first joint exhibition, Saga-Mythology of departure deals with the construction of individual and collective identities, the sense of belonging and family claustrophobia. Through this project, Mokhtar and Suliman seek to dismantle the family in order to better understand the mechanisms of power that constitute it.

Noha Mokhtar and Sahar Suliman are cousins. They share (half) a family, a diasporic condition, and an experience as women artists. Their work together was born of a desire to reflect on the family in a transcultural and transmedia way. Between them, they bring together an expertise in visual arts, anthropology, video and theatre.

This 6-channel film features actress and singer Malika Khatir in the lead role. The film was shot using a special technique. During filming, the artists took it in turns to read the lines of each of the characters live. The actress, who heard the lines through an earpiece, immediately repeated them in front of the camera.

This method made it possible to explore the idea of the body as a space of resonance: the text literally passed through the actress before being captured by the camera. Not knowing the dialogue in advance, the camera followed the reading second by second, guided by the inflections and indications that the performers made with their voices.

Filming took place in the spring of 2025 in flats in Geneva. The six scenes were filmed in close-ups, with particular attention paid to the lighting and chromatic ambiances, using backgrounds built in real spaces, not in a studio.

at Halle Nord, Genève
until June 28, 2025