The Photoforum presents Retour à Helwan – La Maison des vivants [Return to Helwan – The House of the Living] a solo exhibition by Céline Burnand, a Swiss artist based in Cairo.

Her artistic practice is inspired by her training in visual arts as well as in visual anthropology and literature. Her works frequently stage an investigation, and tend to reconstitute or re-enact an existing visual representations. Her research was initially inspired by the fate and work of Aby Warburg, “a German intellectual who revolutionised the aesthetic approach to art history in his search for a ‘diagnosis’ of Western man struggling to heal his contradictions.” He spent five years in a private clinic due to psychosis, and created two unfinished projects, the Mnemosyne Atlas, “some forty screens of black canvas on which are fixed thousands of photographs on iconographic subjects of his research”, and his immense library “where the works are ordered by the principle of the ‘good neighbour’ by which the solution to the problem must be found not in the book one is looking for, but in the one next to it.”

In this same logic of questioning a Western, Cartesian, Christian and neo-colonial heritage, Céline Burnand questions her family archives and visual heritage. She has also been following since 2013 the figure of the snake in several socio-cultural contexts (the religious ceremony of San Domenico in Abruzzo (Italy) or within the Sufi festival of Rifa’i in Egypt), focusing on the subversive power of this symbol in the restoration of the relationship with the other, notably through collaborative practices.

The starting point of this exhibition is the photographic archive of her great-grandfather René Burnand (1882-1960). A Swiss writer and physician, a tuberculosis specialist and director of the Leysin sanatorium, he responded to the call of the Egyptian King Fouad I, who was looking for a candidate to run a hospital for tuberculosis patients. From 1926 to 1929, he directed the rehabilitation and operation of a sanatorium in Helwan (south of Cairo). His personal archive includes 700 photographs and several books on this episode of his life.

In the exhibition, René Burnand’s archives are presented in dialogue with photographic and video images produced by Céline Burnand, often in collaboration with Egyptian friends or descendants of Burnand’s collaborators. She returns to the site of the sanatorium, now in ruins and in the hands of a local mafia, and films dancers, actors and extras in a contemporary and fictional reinterpretation of the history of the hospital and its legacy.

By taking studio portraits of her friends and acquaintances, she explores the historical codes of Western photographic portraiture and their implications for the representation of Egyptian people and their identity. The exhibition thus confronts, without seeking a final resolution, themes such as collective and family history, and the relationship between medicine, colonial heritage and visual culture.

Curated by Danaé Panchaud

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, Pro Helvetia, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Volkart Stiftung, and Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung.

[1] Eduardo Mahieu, La guérison infinie, de Ludwig Binswanger et Aby Warburg, in L’information psychiatrique, 2007/4 (Volume 83), pages 316 à 318

All images: Céline Burnand, Retour à Helwan – La Maison des vivants, 2021