Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil is a leading contemporary artist from the Middle East. His complete works reproduced in this monograph are put into context with a critical essay by Hans Ulrich Obrist and an interview with Marina Abramovic. Youssef Nabil's work oscillates between a personal photographic journal and portraits. He has photographed many international stars, including Sting, David Lynch, Isabella Rossellini, Paolo Coelho, Louise Bourgeois, Jean Nouvel, Omar Sharif, Catherine Deneuve, and Robert Wilson. Since 2003, he has produced a number of self-portraits that reflect his dislocated life away from Egypt in settings linked to his childhood or his travels. These scenes portray a combination of worldly realities and serene dreams, loneliness and fame, eroticism and death.

Youssef Nabil was born in Cairo in 1972 and has lived and worked in Paris and New York since 2002. Hans Ulrich Obrist is a Swiss art critic and curator. Today, he is the Director of the Serpentine Gallery in London. Marina Abramovic is a famous performance artist who began her career in the 1970s. Her work was the subject of a major retrospective at the MoMA in New York in 2010.