“I found it on Google!” Dublin-born Egyptian artist Rafik Greiss cheerfully explains when I compliment La Maison, the café where we chose to meet in Paris’s chic 17th arrondissement. At an intersection of our winter Mondays, Greiss on the way to his storage unit, me heading to a faculty meeting, the café offers an alternative for a studio visit when you’re “between studios”—though immersion in public space is a signature of the artist’s practice. “I produce a lot of my work outside the studio, and I realized I use it mostly for storage. Do I even want a studio again?”
Last year, as Greiss prepared for a solo show at Galerie Balice Hertling in Paris, “The Longest Sleep,” he shared a space with painter Pol Taburet at the international artist residency POUSH. “I like to bounce ideas with other artists and it’s nice to have a community,” Greiss explains. Yet his work transmits an aching loneliness: photographs of string drawn around the wooden frame of an upright piano, a spare selection of found objects that read as relics of a nocturnal pilgrimage.
Slow, ambient sound rose from the basement, emitted by Greiss’s new film, which he realized over the span of many nights spent with walis, or Sufi saints. He made the 12-minute film, The Longest Sleep (2024), last year in Cairo. Its slow-motion shots of a deserted merry-go-round and series of mawlids, trance-inducing Sufi rituals celebrating the birthdays of walis, remind me of scenes from James Baldwin’s threshing floor. But Greiss references Andrew Newberg’s neurotheology: “the study of how the brain functions on religion.” Greiss did not grow up in a religious household, but was “always interested in the way the mind of a religious person works. I feel like all religions are about confronting this fear of death.”
When the waiter places Greiss’s tea on our table (lemon verbena, good for insomnia), he turns the 15-inch screen of his 2016 MacBook Pro toward me (“This is my studio now!”), sharing images of recent work. There’s Lèvres Froides (Die Selektion Cover), 2024, the pair of slender doors he shipped back from a residency in Tbilisi. They bear dusty footprints like ghosts on a threshold; at Balice Hertling, he hung them on the wall.
Greiss prints his black-and-white photographs. He shoots low and at a distance, his images like flashes in a dreamscape. His uses thick Japanese paper, and points out their textured edges—a way to emphasize artistic signature in a lens-based practice. Void of identifying details of place or person, Greiss’s visions of crumbling urban architecture, decaying interiors, and a lone figure, blurred in a run, form a portrait of his feral, roaming eye.
Currently fielding invitations for exhibitions at institutions around the Mediterranean basin, Greiss plots his next move. “As soon as I sell the work from my last show, I’ll travel. I make so much work while I travel because everything’s so new to me, different stimulus entering my brain.” When I email him a week later to ask if he’s decided on a destination, his answer is Egypt. “There, the connection with urban space is very raw.”
