CAN YOU SEE WITH YOUR HEART?
Can You See With Your Heart?
Kunstverein Aughrim
27 June–20 July 2025
Eslam Abd El Salam has been taking photographs his whole life. His constant search for light brings him into contact with people and places in ways that open possibilities and create new affinities in the world. Eslam’s fascination with nature and curiosity around our relationship with it shines throughout his work.
His exhibition Can You See With Your Heart? was developed during a month-long Summer Residency in Aughrim, in collaboration with Craic in the Granite Music & Arts Festival. Opening on 27 June as part of the festival launch, the exhibition continued into July 2025. It featured film photography shot during the artist’s time in Wicklow, as well as installation sound design and textual contributions by collaborators.
About the artist:
Eslam Abd El Salam is an Egyptian visual artist based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His work focuses on walking as a pedagogical practice and is centered around the body: the body in motion, in contact with nature and in the presence of other bodies. Through the mediums of analogue photography, polaroids, text and mixed media, Eslam considers notions of synchronicity, specifically in relation to friendship and serendipitous encounters with others. Eslam's photography often takes place in domestic settings, spaces in which playfulness and vulnerability combine. Deeply embedded in spirituality, Eslam's work expands on what it means to surrender to the present moment, with others and in nature, and with intuition as a guiding principle. Embracing naivety in all its forms, Eslam's work views openness as a means of creating mutual recognition. Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, since 2022, Eslam’s journey to Ireland began in March 2019 as an artist-in-residence at The Curfew Tower in Cushendall. His work has been exhibited internationally in Finland, France, Latvia, Egypt, and the UK.
Kunstverein Aughrim’s collaboration with Eslam Abd El Salam is part of the visual arts strand of Craic in the Granite Music & Arts Festival 2025, supported by Wicklow County Council Arts Office festival awards funded through the Arts Council.