Heba Y. Amin Cairo, Egypt , b. 1980

Heba Y. Amin (b. 1980 in Cairo, based in Berlin) engages with political themes and archival history, using mixed-media including film, photography, performance and installation. Her artistic research takes a speculative, often satirical, approach to challenging narratives of conquest and control. 

Grounded in collaborative research, fieldwork, and performative strategies her practice examines colonial histories, visual technologies, and processes of urban and landscape transformation. In her recent black-and-white series Encaustic Drawings (2025), Heba Y. Amin reclaims camouflage as a critical methodology rather than a military technology. Drawing on archival research into the British Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate established in Egypt during World War II, the works engage with camouflage as a practice of image production deeply entangled with colonial power and the aerial gaze. Photographs, maps, and surveillance images are abstracted and obscured through layered encaustic interventions. With these acts of concealment Amin exposes how landscapes and bodies were rendered visible in ways meant to be mapped, read, and controlled. The series proposes camouflage as a form of resistance – refusing transparency, disrupting image politics, and asserting a right to opacity against systems of surveillance and data extraction.

Heba Y. Amin is Professor of Digital and Time-Based art at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, co-founder of Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for MIZNA journal, and currently sits on the board of Disruption Network Lab. She was awarded the 2025 Hans-Molfenter Preis/City of Stuttgart Prize (Germany), 2022 Nordhorn City Art Prize (Germany), the 2020 Sussmann Artist Award for artists committed to the ideals of democracy and antifascism (Austria), and the 2019 NYC Field of Vision Fellowship (nominated by Oscar winning director Laura Poitras). 

Heba Y. Amin’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2025), Fondazione Merz, Turin (2025), 5th Industrial Art Biennale, Raša (2025), Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2024), DZ Bank, Frankfurt (2024), Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2024), Museum Arnhem, Netherlands (2023), The Mosaic Rooms, London (2021), Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam (2020), Quai Branly Museum, Paris (2020), MAXXI Museum, Rome (2018), Liverpool Biennial (2021), Daimler Contemporary, Berlin (2021), The Guggenheim museum, NYC (2020), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2019), DAAD Gallery, Berlin (2019), 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), Kunsthalle Bremen (2018), 15th Istanbul Biennale (2017), and 12th Dak’Art Biennale (2016), to name a few. 

Her publication, Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork (ed. Anthony Downey) was published by Sternberg Press in 2020 and her works and interventions have been covered by The New York Times, The Guardian, the Intercept, and BBC among others. Furthermore, Amin is one of the artists behind the subversive graffiti action on the set of the television series Homeland which received worldwide media attention.