Aaru (2022) is a photomontage series by the Egyptian photo artist Nermine Hammam (b. 1967). It uses the ancient Egyptian belief in the soul’s journey after death to Aaru, or paradise, as a guiding metaphor for a visceral, at times disturbing self-portrait. Taken together, the twenty-two images that make up this series plot Hammam’s descent from a state of “quiet” contemplation, and memories revisited, to an irresistible outpouring of anger and grief. Aaru is a work about a father, now deceased, and about masculinity, or, more precisely, that excess of masculine energy that tips “the world off its center” and has shaped the artist’s life in significant ways.1Aaru captures both “a state of mourning and an act of purging. It is a cry for help and a search for release; a purging of memories that can no longer be endured.” In ancient Egyptian cosmology, the heart of...
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