Photo of the Week: Heba Khalifa 

Memory is not fixed in Heba Khalifa's work. It is cut apart, layered over and pieced back together through photography, collage and drawing. For her, image-making is also self-making. Her practice pulls apart the archive, stitching together fragments of memory, conflict and fiction in search of something that feels closer to truth.

For this edition of CairoScene’s Photo of the Week, Khalifa shares an unpublished image that marks the beginning of her ongoing project, Tiger's Eye. "The project started with this fight at home, and my relationship with my mother, a relationship built on anger and conflict. I picked the image where we are together but also not together. We belong to two different worlds. We see and not see each other. We reflect things and energies onto each other. As if we don't speak the same language," Khalifa tells CairoScene.

Self-published in late 2025, Tiger's Eye unfolds through photography, collage and drawing. Borrowing an Arabic expression used to shame women with a defiant gaze, Khalifa reclaims the phrase as a lens through which to confront taboo. The project revisits a childhood shaped by trauma, using images to excavate buried memories and trace the slow, unfinished work of grief.

Khalifa is a multimedia artist, documentary photographer, and painter whose work blends photography, painting, and collage to explore hidden emotions. Her practice engages deeply with themes of womanhood, motherhood, our relationship with the body, and the weight of social constraints.

She worked as a documentary photojournalist for eight years with El Shorouk newspaper during the years of the Arab Spring, capturing the rapid changes in Egyptian society, politics, and the streets. In From Inside (2014), she reflected on her experience as a single mother confined within the home during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Later, in Homemade (2016), she collaborated with women to explore psychological connections with the body and the social norms that seek to dictate and confine them.

What’s the story behind this image?

‘Me and My Mother’

From the series Tiger’s Eye (2018–2025).

This work explores the complexities of motherhood and the emotional bonds between mothers and daughters.

Why did you choose this particular image?

I chose it because it’s where everything started: this “conflict” at home with the mother, which I think is at the root of my work. Mothers are our first loves; the complexity of that relationship stays with us forever, and I understood that more when I became a mother too. Many people can relate to this maternal fight.