Hunna Art is pleased to present They Call Me Divine, the first solo exhibition by Egyptian artist Amina Yahia (b. 2000), curated by internationally renowned curator Alexandra Stock.
In They Call Me Divine, Amina Yahia turns her gaze toward the fragile architectures that hold everyday life in contemporary Egypt together: social, emotional and environmental alike. Across ten new oil-on-canvas paintings, the artist offers insights that are neither documentary nor symbolic, but intuitive translations of collective experience into a language of gesture and atmosphere. Throughout these works, Yahia renders what it feels like to live especially amid Cairo’s restless transformation and to remain human within its erasures, wounds and contradictions.
This body of work took shape through living within the city’s density in its streets, thresholds and moods. The artist speaks of these paintings as reflections rather than depictions, ones that are drawn from proximity. They are faces met in passing, the flow of bodies through constricted space, flashes of fatigue or defiance. “I needed to see people every day in the street,” she says, to stay attuned to the pulse of collective life even as it seemed to dissolve.
The title “They Call Me Divine” extends this role of a narrator, but not a sovereign one. Who “they” are is left undefined; the word gathers a dispersed chorus of family, faith, authority, convention, without granting any single voice power. The sentence begins mid-conversation, a calm condition rather than an accusation.
Across these new works, figures appear suspended between awareness and surrender. Motifs such as crows, leafless trees and pregnant girls form a vocabulary of contradiction. The crow hovers between omen and observer. The girls, at once innocent and indoctrinated, mirror a society that normalises control while calling it virtue.
At its heart, “They Call Me Divine” asks how to inhabit a world that keeps losing its ground, where nothing is conclusively resolved yet something essential becomes visible long enough to be shared. In these invisible negotiations of daily survival, bodies carry history, memory strains toward myth and a stubborn, divine grace persists.
Press release from Hunna Art
Image: Amina Yahia. Tell my mother. 2025. Oil on canvas. 170 x 300 cm © Amina Yahia
