Public Image
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In Rafik Greiss’ work, we encounter a state between wakefulness and dreaming. Driven by the artist’s itinerant drifting within and across disparate urban landscapes, Greiss’ photographs, installations and videos reflect deeply on the complexities of movement and time, pursuing an impression of simultaneous distance and proximity.
In Public Image, Greiss presents a pair of photographic projects across CAG’s public sites. On the gallery’s façade is an arrangement of images from By the Highway, a series made in collaboration with Ser Serpas, depicting her creation of impromptu, temporary sculptures. At Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Greiss has installed photographs of glass vitrines taken in the Agricultural Museum in Giza. Responding to the function of the display case to make its contents visible yet physically inaccessible, these deliberately ambiguous photographs double the station’s windows, taking glass itself – as opposed to what it reveals and encloses – as their subject.
Rafik Greiss (b. 1997) is an Egyptian artist based in Paris working across photography, installation and time-based media. His practice reflects on transformation, memory and the shifting states of images and objects through a formally and technically diverse approach that moves between digital and analogue processes. Often described as atmospheric, provocative and sensual, his work is driven by what Mitchell Anderson calls a “commitment to sensation rather than theme or medium.” His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Balice Hertling, Paris (2024, 2021), as well as in group exhibitions at the Istanbul Biennial (2025); Simian, Copenhagen (2025); Kunsthalle Zürich (2024); and the Swiss Institute, New York, with Ser Serpas (2023). His work is held in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Pinault Collection, Paris; Louis Vuitton Collection, Paris; and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris.
Public Image
Contemporary Art Gallery, VancouverApril 17 – Sept 13, 2026
Gelatin Silver Print
Gelatin Silver Print
22 x 32 ¾ in each
Gelatin Silver Print
Gelatin Silver Print
Inkjet prints on found board
Gelatin Silver Print
44 ¼ x 22 in; 46 x 23 ½ in framed
Gelatin Silver Print
Gelatin Silver Print
44 ¼ x 22 in; 46 x 23 ½ in framed