VII Mentor Program 2025
Amina Kadous (1991-) is a visual artist based in Cairo, Egypt. She received her Bachelor in Fine Arts from Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine arts in Boston. Her work tackles concepts of memory and identity. She believes in the ephemerality of experience. Nothing lasts, documentation of experiences, of the objects and moments of the physical world only lasts when it is passed on. She believes a photograph is an object that holds memories and meanings, keepsakes that give life. Photography as an art has been a medium allowing her to treasure, hold and bless the past she has not lived but only through the stories and eyes of those who have narrated it. Her work is a linkage between the past and present through the layers of time as they fold and unfold. The exploration of time serves, for her, as a means for understanding who she is as a person. Characterizing herself as an explorer of ideas, she is driven by the spirit of inquiry as she seeks to comprehend the meanings and hidden ambiguities of lives, not her own, through the interactive nature of viewer, photographer, object and environment. She is driven by experience as a woman and an Egyptian. That is her signature: her work, like time, evolves…
Her work has been exhibited locally and Internationally.
She exhibited as part of the Photography Biennale of the contemporary Arab world at the Cite Des Arts in Paris in 2019. She participated at the 12th edition of the Bamako Biennale of Photography and being awarded the Centre Soleil d’Afrique Prize for her project, A crack in the Memory of My Memory. This prize is awarded to an outstanding female artist from Africa whose work shows signs of promise and development. Her work was also exhibited at the The AfriKa Museum and Tropen museum in the Netherlands part of the World Press group exhibition, Connecting views: Talents from the APJD. She was awarded a grant from Magnum Foundation and Prince Claus foundation and was one of the top ten finalists for the Everyday projects grant for her current long-term series White Gold. In 2022, She was awarded the Contemporary African photography Prize for her project White Gold, in the same year she was also awarded the Prix De La Photo Madame Figaro at Arles photography festival for the same series. In 2023 her project White Gold was also nominated for the Prix Pictet prestigious award and Deutsche Börse prestigious Prize. Kadous was awarded the Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Award in 2023.