Nikolskaya’s moment: 

Capturing the ruins of modernity

Xenia Nikolskaya is a Russian-Swedish photographer who has lived in Cairo for several years, after first visiting in 2003. Her photographs speak to absence and the relentless passage of time, and chronicle what remains of past lives, the faded beauty of palaces, the random objects that were left behind when addresses changed. She has entered the liminal space of the ruins of modernity and —with her photographs — brought colonial-era Egypt into a wider discussion of the aesthetics of ruin photography. Are the images part of a narrative of decay, or do they up-end and reclaim a now-passed era of European influence in Egypt?

Part of the emerging field of ruin photography, the collection of images, under the exhibition title DUST: Past & Present, documents urban decay. But it also reframes what we understand of the oft-romanticized colonial era. Where did the people who once lived in these grand rooms go? Why were the brocade-covered chairs, more “Louis Farouk” than Belle Époque, left behind in a corridor? They forever face each other, waiting for two old friends to sit together and talk the night away. Only ghosts (or homeless cats) sit there now. A wooden tennis racket is set atop a pile of leather-bound suitcases. At what point did the packer realise he couldn’t take his Cairo life with him?

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“As a girl, I was very affected by Alice in Wonderland,” Nikolskaya told me. “We have this amazing radio–theatre tradition. There was a record, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in Russian, in vinyl, with the best actors. This was a Soviet–Russian version of Alice in Wonderland. I still have the lyrics in my head.”

Those lyrics were the words of Vladimir Vysotsky, the much-loved singer-songwriter, poet, and actor, who wrote some thirty songs for the album. The double-disk recording was released in 1974 and is revered by Russians who grew up during the period. The rabbit hole that Nikolskaya fell into was the metropolis of Cairo. She first arrived in 2003, commissioned to work as a photographer for a team of Russian archaeologists. In 2006, she returned. Walking the streets of Cairo, she began to develop her plan to photograph abandoned villas, palaces and theatres. Over the next six years, Nikolskaya travelled the length of Egypt, from Alexandria in the north to Esna in the south, and gained access to more than thirty-five historical villas and buildings. Her photographs document what remains of these now almost forgotten places.

When Alice followed the white rabbit and fell into a deep hole, she landed in a strange corridor lined with locked doors. Just as Alice found a key to unlock a door and continue her fabulous journey, Nikolskaya, with perseverance and charm, managed to enter the locked doors of Egypt’s colonial-era buildings and photograph their interiors.

As a daughter of the great Russian city of St. Petersburg, Nikolskaya felt at home in Cairo. Both are world cities, their distinctive eras of construction the result of war and whim, of grand ambition and global commerce. Both were built on marshlands. Their historic centres have, over time, fallen into disrepair and, at various times, sought restoration and renewal.

In 2012, Nikolslaya published her first book, Dust: Egypt’s Forgotten Architecture, the result of her travels in Egypt. In 2015, she was honoured with an exhibition of the Dust photographs at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. It was only the second time that a photographer had been exhibited there, the first being the American Annie Leibovitz. Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage Museum and curator of the exhibit Dust: Cairo’s Forgotten Architecture, wrote:

 “Decrepit architecture is wonderful, but not long-lived. Either it collapses, or it is restored or reconstructed, losing the charm of its authenticity. This happens in all great cities. Xenia Nikolskaya has preserved a special Cairo for us, and she has done it in a way that only a Petersburger could, in a way that only someone who knows the charm of the decay that we suffered and adored in 1920s, and in the 1950s, and in the 1990s, could. The aesthetics of a withering away is one of the forms of propaganda of renewal. When the renewal takes place, it is not only the document that remains — there is also an artistic memory. It is good to know that, for Cairo, such a memory has been preserved by a Petersburg artist.”

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Nikolskaya places her images both within, but also apart from, the genre of ruin photography. As she writes: “Dust is primarily a form of photographic archaeology. I discover and collect buildings by photographing, creating a narrative that gives these places a new status. . . . I never changed the interiors I photographed: for me the space was like a crime scene — everything was important the way it already was.” She refers to her photographs as being “in a liminal state of uncertainty” and considers the work the result of an ethnographically informed methodology:

In the context of contemporary architectural/interior photography practice, Dust occupies a particular niche. . . . Dust is a kind of ethnographic photography located somewhere between [Simon] Norfolk’s images of the aftermath of war in Afghanistan, focusing on social and political disaster and depicting the layers of history of these buildings, their use, and abuse, and [Anders] Petersens’s documentation of buildings on the verge of disappearance in Stockholm in the 1960s and 1970s.3

Nikolskaya’s photographs offer a portal into another time. The blood-red curtains in a room in the Serageldin Palace in Cairo are torn, their dull linings exposed. A massive dining table, with seating for twenty, upholstered in the same red fabric, sits waiting for an evening that will never come. There are only nineteen chairs. Did the missing chair have a life beyond the shuttered room? Is it today the purloined throne of a night watchman? Or did the former occupants take it as a souvenir when they abandoned their palace?

Building debris carpets the floor of the Bagous Palace. A portrait of then-president Hosni Mubarak hangs from the doorway of a room in Prince Said Halim’s Palace in Marouf, Downtown Cairo. The palace was at one time repurposed as a school. All that remains of that incarnation are blackboards affixed on either side of a shabby door, set at the height of a small child.

The images are deeply evocative. The maids and doormen left two generations ago. The floors are unswept, the walls are layered in dust or painted in lurid colours, new occupants, most likely squatters, making their mark on rooms that were once the property of Egypt’s upper class. Mismatched plastic chairs are arranged around a crude wooden tea table in the parqueted salon of Cairo’s Sakakini Palace. The faded white wall of a room in the former American Consulate in Port Said is covered with row upon row of dark-brown handprints, probably made from the blood of a chicken slaughtered in the hope of good fortune.

This purposeful abandonment of property speaks to the changing laws of Egypt, from the seizure of property under President Gamal Abdul Nasser and the post-World War II flight from Egypt by Egyptian Jews and the Europeans who had sought their fortunes here; to the complex laws that regulate inheritance, an ever-multiplying number of family members holding title to a single property, waiting for an inheritance that will never come.

There is a silence to Nikolskaya’s photographs. And yet the empty rooms speak to us, with their layers of narrative and dissonant information. The dialogue between the past and the present continues in the camera’s capture of a moment.

Carol Berger

Cairo, August 2020

Carol Berger is a writer and anthropologist who lives in Cairo. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and the London Review of Books, among other publications.