The young artist Yara Hatem’s last exhibition, Adjustment Journey – held at the Cairo Gallery in Zamalek between 11 January and 5 February – is a collection of humorous drawings on paper beautifully curated by visual artist Mahmoud Hamdy, the director and owner of the gallery.
According to Hatem, the collection is based on her family cat, Bakiza, adjusting to life with the artist and her family. “At the beginning, Bakiza, the beautiful Persian cat, was frightened, but she soon became the lady of the house,” she told me in an interview at the gallery. “This is my visual diary as a cat lover and companion. I’ve learned a lot from cats. They are very selective. They choose the best place in the house to sleep in. And, they are very smart, especially when they act like queens, assuming that everyone in the house should work for their welfare.”
In the same vein, the collection represents the artist’s journey through the art scene, which began in 2013. To achieve this level of spontaneity and perfection, Hatem works daily, making her drawings a mirror of her inner world, as she puts it. “As I am constantly moving from the college to the studio to the gallery and eventually back home, at some point, I feel like the cat is projecting her own journey back onto me. I am always surrounded by sketchbooks and pencils. This is usually the way I regain my stability and good mood after a difficult or busy time.”
Born in 1991, Hatem graduated from the Mural Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Zamalek in 2013, and she is a teaching assistant there now. With her students, she adopts a workshop teaching method instead of just studying the usual rules as she strongly believes that each art student has his own unique artistic identity. She participated in many group exhibitions before making her debut, Penetrating the Horizon, in 2023 at the Islamic Museum, followed by My Blue Garden in 2024 at the Faculty of Fine Arts. “That journey, which went on for 13 years, has helped me to understand myself as an artist, and why I aspired to being one.”
She earned her PhD, which focused on the aesthetics of Iznik ceramics in Turkey in 2025. Her participation in the Belgorod region art festival in Russia in 2016 helped her to gain a different visual perspective as she was exposed to a different, green landscape and unique architectural styles. Hatem’s academic studies reflect an interest in Islamic, especially Malemute design, which is evident in her drawings, in the background patterns and costumes of her figures. This was amply demonstrated in the latest exhibition.
Adjustment Journey featured 101 pieces, including ink and mixed media on paper, acrylic on canvas and glazed pottery. A vertical 3.3 m by 48 cm ink on paper roll, dominated by blue and purple, depicts different images of a girl, with various background motifs, as if the girl is on a ride in some magic castle. Another, 18 by 28 cm depicts a huge cat with a tail so long it is wrapped around his female companion’s head. Although there is no obvious connection connecting the exhibits, they are united by the artist’s visual narration technique and a palette dominated by red and blue.
An expressive, often surrealist approach celebrates the reciprocal relationship between human and animal figures. In most images, the cats are depicted as chubby, pleasant and sly creatures. The humans are likewise funny, curious, and playful. On two occasions the cats are larger than the humans. In many pieces male and female figures appear alongside cats in repetitive patterns that evoke geometry. One 100 x 70 cm acrylic on canvas painting depicts a young man and woman in a romantic pose surrounded by a window and colourful plants, with a huge orange cat in the foreground as if guarding them.
In a separate room, a few geometric pottery and wood pieces were exhibited. Their polished classicism belied the deliberate naiveté of many drawings. “It all depends on the artistic capacity of the material. Unlike other media, paper and pencils, by default, invite the artist to create freely and spontaneously,” the artist explained. Glazed pottery is something she started doing 14 years ago as part of the preparation for her graduation project. She acquired this passion for experimentation and recycling from her parents, who are professional artists and art professors at the Faculty of Art Education in Zamalek.
A group of monochrome ink drawings takes up space in a corner of the gallery’s spacious reception. One of these small drawings depicts a little girl in a dress with a cat head, trying to express something to the audience using her hands. Another is the portrait of a young woman with a giraffe’s head. The portraits look mysteriously beautiful, embodying the artist’s message about the unity of the earth’s creatures. “This is not inspired by a specific myth or legend,” she told me. “Sometimes I actually see people in the shape of animals. It is an attempt to go inside a creature’s mind and find out why they behave the way they do...”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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