Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2023 - Student interview - 07. Sabry Beshir Mohamed

SABRY BESHIR MOHAMED: Hi. I'm Sabry Beshir Mohamed, and I studied visual arts at Ashfield Boys High School. So my artwork is-- it's a photomedia piece based off pretty much the challenging of identity, individuality, religion, and culture. And it really does battle and sort of face off the ideas of what religion is meant to be and the idea of personality, what you want to do yourself and what is true to yourself.

My inspiration was definitely my personal experiences, then as well as a few artists that I met or saw their artworks. One named Sam Taylor-Wood. She is an artist that pretty much does works that are based off the idea of air and wind manipulation of physique and body movement in mid air.

And as well as Anya Anti, who is another artist who pretty much just focused on the idea of, I would say, pretty much fantasy or what stuck to her personal beliefs, like stuff about the Great Barrier Reef or as well as pollution. She included that in a lot of her works. And colour was a big thing for her and contrast. And looking at her works and looking at other artists artworks, I found that contrast was something that mainly stuck out to me personally.

And I was like, OK, a lot of the influences that I saw were all photo media or photo-related artwork. So I'm like, if I like photo media, why don't I stick to that? But then afterwards started playing around classroom with my teacher and we were just in the back of the room in the studio, messing around, and then she pulls out this random large sheet of fabric. And we're like, wait, we can probably use this as part of the work and actually make a bit more personal. I'm like, OK, why not?

But the primer is sort of sitting on a table. And that table is just photoshopped out, which is why it has that sort of floating in the air movement. But originally, we tried the black backdrop, played around, Photoshopped it a little bit. But then afterwards, we were like, you know, why don't we try green screen and see if it's any better. I'm telling you, green screen was not any better. It just made Photoshopping a lot more harder.

But the good thing was that during the green screen is that we actually found out the poses that I wanted to use, the final pose that we had. The lighting was controlled and everything. But at the same time, it was kind of beneficial because we could just control the lighting ourselves. But, yeah, did those photos. And then in the end, after we got all those photos done, we printed them all out, messed around with a few layouts, and we had about maybe 200 final photos that we decided from. It took a long time to decide.

But then we narrowed it down to 15, used those 15, got Photoshop on the screen and the classroom, and messed around on a black backdrop in there and black canvas, just moved the photos around and played around with that. And once we actually played around with the different images, we finally got the final piece.

So in that, the work and the rug symbolises the idea of religion. And the sheet symbolises the idea of death in the Islamic religion, where when a person dies, they are buried and wrapped in cloth. So in the second piece, the 3 images that are sort of set together, they're each representing challenging of religion, challenging of identity, and it's sort of accepting that I'm entangled by all these expectations that are set by religion. And then it's sort of, at the same time, me facing the expectations when I'm relieved or not within the sheet.

But then with the one that it's on its own towards the right, that is where-- that is pretty much just an image of acceptance, me sitting there freely and relaxed with the cloth still around me is that religion is always going to be a part of me, but it isn't something that I have to completely succumb to.

So my plans for the future are definitely going towards the theatre and design field. I start uni at UNSW in July, and I'm really looking forward to costume designing, set designing, because that's always been something that I want to go down the path. And photography I'm definitely going to keep in mind, but it's more of a hobby, more of a thing that I'd like to do with friends and I'm going out.

But going into theatre has always stuck to me as I did drama in Year 12, did costume design for that too. And I think, from there, I definitely want to dive towards the field and hopefully play around and see what I lean more towards in theatre.

[music playing]