Faces/Places: Alexandria to Iowa City

Pensée stands outdoors with both hands against a tree trunk, looking directly at the camera with a shawl draped around her.

Leaning Against Tree, collaborative portrait

Pensée stands outdoors with her hands pressed against the trunk of a tree. She looks directly into the camera and has a shawl covering her.

Pensée stands beside a tree in a torso-up portrait, looking directly at the camera as a reflector illuminates her face.

Portrait against Tree, collaborative portrait

Pensée stands by a tree with a reflector illuminating her face. This is a portrait from the torso up. She looks directly at the camera with a sturdy gaze.

Pensée Ismael

Pensée Ismael (she/her) is a human-woman artist transplanted to Iowa City from Alexandria, Egypt. In a past life, she was an English major and a translator, ESL teacher, and Arabic TA. She then, shifted towards dance, performance art, and independent cinema in her hometown as a means of resistance and telling stories from the Global South. This is her first photography project on film. Prior to this, she was an amateur phone-photographer in the aftermath of the Egyptian Refolution (*a term coined by Iranian-American sociologist Asef Bayat). She is about to start her 2nd year in the MFA program of the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of Iowa this Fall.

IG: @strawbarin

Email: panso-ismael25@gmail.com

Through Faces/Places: Alexandria to Iowa City I explore my relationship with the body of the camera, sometimes as an open door for connection and others as a questionable machine of intimacy. At times intimidated with the camera, and at others at ease, I find myself face to face with the fear of being seen; found out. I have always been fascinated by humans at work, machine-human interaction and the sounds and voices of machine drilling into the human psyche along with the majestic ways in which bodies move to perform mundane tasks in different environments. After I was transplanted to Iowa City, I learnt that the local construction workers in my hometown Alexandria, Egypt had executed the dismantling and shutting down of Al Raml tramway, a means of public transportation that runs across the city parallel to the Mediterranean Sea, an act that would alter the urban and social infrastructure of familiar Alexandrian streets, and faces to my mind's eye. To commute home in Alexandria I would take the tram from Al Raml Station to Schutz, to commute home in Iowa City, I now take the #8 bus from Downtown Transit Interchange. But over the summer the bus stop has changed temporarily to Court Street because of the Washington Street Reconstruction Project. By collaborating with the camera to document the labour of the construction workers of Dubuque Street, and taking a new route home, I attempt to witness change in downtown Iowa City streets, and make portraits of Iowan faces that are now becoming familiar to my small corner in the world between Alexandria and Iowa City.

Faces/Places: Alexandria to Iowa City is an invitation to resolve the sensorial tension I feel in my bones every time I hold a camera.

Track 2 Saba7 el Fol - صباح الفل by Walad who is one of my favorite sound artists from Egypt. He often experiments with music and explores new genres. This track was one of many sounds that inspired this project.

A surveillance camera is mounted on the corner of a brick building, with an institutional façade superimposed in the background.

Portrait of a Photographer

a surveillance camera is mounted on a corner of a brick building, with a superimposed image of an institutional building façade in the background

A young person with short brown hair, a red shirt, and a gold necklace looks at the camera in front of a stone structure, with a blurred foreground.

A black-and-white double exposure layers a Deere excavator’s bucket and arm over the Old Capitol dome and surrounding trees.

tête-à-tête

a color image of a young person with short brown hair, a red shirt and a golden necklace. She stands in front of a stone structure with eyes facing the camera; the foreground is blurred

An Overarching Question

a black and white image with a double exposure effect showing the two faces of a DEERE excavator's bucket and arm superimposed over the Old Capitol building’s dome and trees.

A dark-haired man from Handan, China, looks at the camera outdoors near Dubuque Street Hill, with foliage, a foreground prism, and a tear-like effect beneath one eye.

He Leaves Town

a color portrait of a dark-haired man from Handan, China, looking directly at the camera. He poses outdoors by the Dubuque Street hill, with trees and foliage in the background and foregrounded prism. A somewhat-analogue-tear comes down from his right eye; a faint smile on his face

A black-and-white double exposure shows three workers digging trenches, two partly buried in Dubuque Street and one covering his face behind them.

Burial Rituals

a double-exposed black and white image of 3 construction workers in hard hats digging trenches. The two in the foreground have their lower bodies buried in the concrete and grass of Dubuque Street, Iowa City. The solitary worker in the background holds his hands across his face with his hat facing the land

Delirium

a color image of a human woman in her brown short hair wearing a red shirt. She is seen from the side; looking down, away from the camera, with a blurry colorful prism-overlay in the foreground along with the Hancher blocks’ stone structure. The second exposed layer shows a tree from Hickory Hill Park

A black-and-white double exposure shows an excavator over a dirt pile outside UIowa’s Engineering Building, with trees and structures faintly visible.

A surveillance camera sits between the curved and rectangular sections of a modern concrete building beneath a cloudy sky.

No Road for You

a black and white image showing an excavator arm and bucket positioned over a pile of dirt in front of UIowa’s Engineering Building with its many windows. Trees and other structures are faintly visible in the double-exposed background

A black-and-white outdoor portrait of a smiling nonbinary person with curly hair and closed eyes.

STOP LOOKING AT ME!

a modern concrete building with a curved section featuring X-shaped beams and a rectangular section with numerous windows under a cloudy sky. A surveillance camera is positioned on the rooftop–between the building’s two sections

A young Egyptian man in a dark T-shirt stands by a white door with red trim, with a double exposure of his cat Cuddles resting in grass.

Authentic

a black and white portrait of a non-binary person with curly hair and closed eyes smiling in an outdoor setting

A black-and-white portrait shows a nonbinary person holding a witch doll over half their face as the doll raises a wooden hand.

Man and His Cat

a young Cairene Egyptian man wearing a dark t-shirt. Standing outside a white door with red trim, he stares directly at the camera. Behind him is a large, blurry orange fur that is the double-exposed layer of his adopted cat “Cuddles” lying lazy in grass

A double-exposed image shows two construction workers in hard hats, one operating machinery and the other walking toward him, with a truck behind them.

Witch Doll and Its Human

A black and white portrait of a non-binary person looking straight into the camera while holding their witch doll to their face. The doll has a pointed hat, dark clothing and threaded dark hair. It covers half their face, with its gaze directed away from the camera, while its wooden hand waves at the camera

They Told Me to Keep Away

a double-exposed image of two construction workers in hard hats, one is operating machinery the other moving towards him, and a large truck is parked in the background

A young man squats beside a large bronze bust, crossing his arms and looking away as he imitates the sculpture’s expression.

"I Did Not Know This Would Include Questions!"

a young man in his early thirties squatting next to a large bronze bust of an elderly man. The young man’s gaze is away from the camera with arms crossed and eyes imitating the bronze sculpture beside him

A construction site at the bottom of Dubuque Street Hill shows a Bobcat skid-steer loader and a Bowker excavator.

Bowker Meets Bobcat

a construction site with a Bobcat skid-steer loader and a Bowker excavator at the bottom of Dubuque Street’s hill

A double exposure shows a woman with short wavy hair and glasses on a garden swing, layered with trees and Pensée looking at the camera from a rooftop.

When Picking Mulberries

a double-exposed image of a Cairene Egyptian woman with short black wavy hair, and glasses. She is wearing a plaid pink shirt, and sitting on a swing in her garden in Grinnell, Iowa. Her gaze is toward the horizon. The image is layered over a background of trees and Pensée’s face with her curly hair and a red-brownish shirt. She looks straight into the camera as she stands on the rooftop of the Visual Arts Building in Iowa City

A John Deere skid steer pushes broken concrete slabs across Dubuque Street.

Un-Earthing

a John Deere skid steer loader is pushing a pile of broken concrete slabs across Dubuque Street

Pensée lies on a metal grate beside curved pipes by the Iowa City river, arms outstretched and eyes closed.

Flattened (collaborative portrait with Esé Emmanuel)

Pensée lies on her back on a metal grate atop a concrete structure, with arms outstretched and eyes closed. Two curved metal pipes rise from the concrete beside her. She is by the riverbank of Iowa City’s river by the bridge between the Art History Library and IMU

Pensée’s face presses against a scanner, distorted beside a birth control packet and scattered pills, framed by film strips in an imagined MRI setting.

MRI for Endo

a side of Pensée’s face is pressed against the glass of a scanner machine, distorting her features, with a blister across her face. Her ear has two silver piercings. One packet of birth-control pills prescribed for endometriosis is visible to the left. Two white pills are visible in her hair along with 5 white and 1 red pill visible near her pressed lips in a vomit gesture. Her gaze is away from the scanner’s beam. The image is framed horizontally by two exposed 35mm film strips. She is inside an imagined MRI machine, where she hears birds chirping