Limen: Thresholds / ليمين : الجير وعتبَات أُخرَى: Mohamed Monaiseer, Curated by Hannah Elsisi

Hannah Elsisi on Limen: Thresholds 

A lone figure traverses the foliage of a burial site in Rashid, Egypt. The ashen ground crunches beneath his feet. Birds circle overhead. A cocoon slowly forms. The sweet melodies of a quranic recital can be heard in the distance. 

Limen, is the firmament or threshold binding things in togetherness and separation. In liminal time-spaces, heterotopias obtain where all manner of ambiguity reigns. Liminality is generative, its ambiguities and contradictions power spiritual, natural and ecological transformations; inscribing resilience in renewal. 

In Egypt, liman, a colloquial term for prisons still used today, traces its etymology to the Ottoman-Turkish adaptation of the Greek limen. Originally describing the threshold where a ship left the harbour and disappeared from view behind a veil (ghisha’ غشاء) of mist, liman evolved to mean harbour in Ottoman usage. By the 18th century, it indexed shipbuilding yards located along Egypt’s limestone quarries, which were repurposed into convict labour prisons in 19th-century Egypt under Mohammed Ali’s great drive for military expansion. This layered history intertwines the notions of barzakh, thresholds, and liminal spaces, connecting human life-cycles to environmental landscapes and societal structures in flux.

Central to this exhibition is the concept of liminality in ritual anthropology which resonates with the artist’s long-time meditation on barzakh—an Islamic theological term describing a realm of in-betweenness and transformation. In Sunni and Shia traditions, it represents the intermediary state where souls reside between death and resurrection—a spiritual waiting room shaped by one’s earthly deeds. Sufi interpretations expand this understanding, framing barzakh as a mystical threshold, a space of divine encounter where the physical and spiritual realms dissolve into one another. Often associated with the space between life and death, barzakh also evokes broader thresholds: between land and sea, root and tip, the material and the metaphysical.

In Limen, these threads converge as Monaiseer stretches barzakh beyond the motifs of the eastern Islamicate world with a meditation on the universality of space-times of in-betweenness: of being neither here nor there, of belonging to this world while existing irretrievably beyond it. Such heterotopias are redolent grounds for navigating historical processes of collective loss, forced migration, political and natural cycles and the anthropocene. 

The figure of the عنقاء [‘anqaa’] or phoenix, hovers over Limen. From its ashes branch endless roots and leaves. A creature of everlasting renewal in Assyrian mythology, the ‘anqaa’ is an age-old protagonist of ancient Egyptian rituals of the annual passage of migratory birds through the city of the sun (‘An/Heliopolis). In Limen, fragile yet durable materials link ecological degradation to human histories of displacement and resilience. 

I invite you to follow the lone figure as he tracks the flight of birds risen from the ashes to map liminal journeys between (other) worlds.