Xenia Nikolskaya is an award-winning Russian-Swedish photographer currently based in Cairo. A former curator of the Russian National Centre of Photography and former head of Rossiya Segodnya’s exhibition project department, she is a Fulbright Fellow with a PhD from Sunderland University, UK. She has taken part in more than forty international exhibitions and her works are preserved at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. She is the author of The House My Grandfather Built, which won the 2021 Swedish Photobook Award. Heba Farid is co-founder of TINTERA, a Cairo based photography gallery with an office in London. Omar Nagati is an architect and urban planner and co-founder of CLUSTER, an urban design and research platform also in Cairo.
Large, carefully composed and beautifully lit images --Sunday Telegraph Stunning --Plain Magazine Very arresting images --BBC Extraordinary . . . The book documents the abandoned palaces and salons of an Egypt you don't often see in the headlines: the golden age of Cairene opulence. --Roads & Kingdoms Her painterly compositions and lambent lighting (which in most cases is natural) serve to give the impression that these are stage sets, only waiting for the arrival of the actors. --Voyager Dust is not just a documentation of these fascinating architectural spaces, it also traces the idea of a typology of absence. . . Avoiding any kind of nostalgia, the book challenges its reader: going back to this Egyptian dust also takes us deep into our own expectations of life and notions of legacy. --The Global Journal Egypt's most magnificent buildings have stood unloved-and unlooted-for decades. But a new book of photographs may change that. --SEVEN The Cairo [Nikolskaya] captures with her lens is a European city, its grandeur and dilapidation devoid of exotic oriental motifs and shown as somehow frozen in time. --The National Nikolskaya brings these palaces back to life --Egypt Today Dust explores the conditions and relevance of empty architectural spaces in Egypt, presenting an entwined dualism: dust as materiality that layers the city, literally tracing the passage of time upon urban objects - but also as a temporal metaphor that registers these changes on the level of memories, both past and present. --Cairo 360