The Wall

Tunnels are about confinement, fear and uncertainty. One might even say they are metaphors for an illness that we know is curable, but don’t know what that cure entails. There is hope, but also uncertainty.
What prevails is the need to fight to keep the flame of life alive. Tunnels are dark; a sort of hell we enter on our own volition and through which we proceed by trial and error, cautiously, careful not to brush against the dark walls. Below ground, in a Hades-like prison, we are cut off from the sun and are forced to retreat into a kind of infancy; locked away in a disturbing, hostile anti-nature. There is a clear opposition between darkness and light, liberty and jail, joy and sorrow. The tunnel to which the artist refers is a metaphor for the situation in which he sees his native Egypt today.