Hiraeth

You have your mother’s eyes 

// 

I have been noticing distance, day in and day out,

few and far in between. As one does.

I journal about it, go for a walk or take a nap, and it's either on the back burner or an alchemy.

Zein(at), or Lama. 

You have your mother's eyes, as you have been told.

The project is an effort to understand—for lack of a better word—distance and politics and psychogeography, the physicality and the emotion of it.

The door was half-open, but the gaze pierced through. How early mornings bear witness.

and, if I’m being honest, my gestures are all inherited. 

Anne and Mona, not to forget Noor.

A visual ode to motherly care and labour that lives and breathes miles away:

by the bridge that is built at birth/

by the narrative maintained with our phone calls/

by the walk that dismantles the border/

by the novelty of the hope/

by the plans stuttering the throat…

Writing "to" gets me closer, and "in between" makes it all worthwhile.

The muscles you're gaining are all memory cells, or notes. What traces does absence leave us?

A collection of prose, imagery, and objects that morphs into an installation about and for home. A work in progress that forms a wider investigation about displacement, care, distance, and belonging. 

Hireath is a collection of prose, imagery and objects that morphs into an installation about and for home. Work in progress that forms a wider investigation about displacement, care, distance and belonging. Hiraeth is a Welsh word that describes a deep, bittersweet longing for home, time or place to which you can never return - or one that may never have existed. 

Eslam is an artist from Cairo, now based in Belfast. His work focuses on walking as a pedagogical practice and is centered around the body: the body in motion, in contact with nature, and in the presence of other bodies.

Through analogue photography, Polaroids, text, moving image, and mixed media, Eslam considers notions of synchronicity, specifically in relation to friendship and serendipitous encounters with others. His work often takes place in domestic settings, spaces in which playfulness and vulnerability combine. Deeply embedded in spirituality, Eslam's work expands on what it means to surrender to the present moment, with others and in nature, and with intuition as a guiding principle.

Embracing naivety in all its forms, Eslam's work views openness as a means of creating mutual recognition.

Eslam recently undertook a residency at Tsarino Foundation, Bulgaria. He is a selected artist for FUTURES 2026 European Photography Platform (PhotoIreland, Dublin) and has exhibited nationally and across the island in CCA Derry~Londonderry, Portview Trade Centre, Catalyst Arts, Kunstverein Aughrim and internationally in Austria, Latvia, France, Egypt and Bulgaria. 

Eslam will exhibit a continuation of this work in progress at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, in December 2026. 

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