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TIRING, 2006. Photo series and single channel video.
TIRING by Hermann Huber is a film piece between documentary and docu-fiction. It is embedded in the intricate web of history and stories surrounding one of the most spectacular buildings in Egypt’s capital: The Tiring Building on Attaba Square. A landmark at the interface of the old and the new city, the Tiring Building was once the epicentre of trade in the Arabic world and a temple of luxury and fashion crowned by a glass globe carried by four Atlas figures. When the First World War erupted, the Tiring-empire began to crumble. The elegant department store changed owners several times in the course of the following decades. For a while the illusion of luxurious exuberance was held up, but in the sixties and seventies, the mirage of a life in silk and pearls evaporated and Attaba Square as well as the Tiring Building deteriorated into a slum. Austrian photographer and documentarist Huber strips down the symbolical and material qualities of Cairo’s four-story flagship of world trade from the first era of globalization – which, above all, meant exploiting the colonies – by dismantling it in a series of sequences shot from different angles. (text: Thomas Mießgang)
* Vienna, 1966, lives and works in Vienna
