Our Hidden Room is a love song to a fragile father – who succeeded, however, in instilling in his son the true meaning of resilience – and to photography, the language that Mohamed Hassan (born in Alexandria, in 1984) has chosen to bind together the tattered remnants of a tragic story.

This fourth personal exhibition in the cycle devoted to the concept of The Body I Live In is entitled Our Hidden Room, curated by Irene Alison and Paolo Cagnacci. The photographs are by Mohamed Hassan, and tell the story of the photographer’s father, born in Egypt in the Fifties and forced to struggle all his life with mental illness. In the upheaval of a tumultuous life scarred initially by abuse and later by his own bipolar disorder that led to periods of hospitalization and a suicide attempt, the man found relief, refuge and even joy in photography, pushing the limits of obsession, in the need to express himself through this vehicle which offered him a ray of light even in the darkest hours. This same passion burns today in his son, who has devoted his entire life to photography. This project – which won the “Star Photobook Dummy Award” 2024 and is now published by RM in an intimate, delicate and touching book – is dedicated to his father, who died in 2010.

It is a voyage through memory, into identity, probing the shadows of the secret rooms in the mind and the darkroom which shaped the father’s phantoms and the son’s dreams.