This painting by Ahmad El-Ganayni is full of surreal allusiveness if not symbolism. It reveals the agony of the common people in todays's Egypt but it also evokes hopes of emergence and self-liberation from the chains of a past not devoid of both glory and suffering. At the same time, the past, the popular traditions and the nation's history are not discarded but preserved symbolically in this work. The structures that evoke pyramids represent both the Pharaonic roots of Egypt, and the tents of bedouins. At the same time, their tops, looking like faces, the beaks of birds, but also the mouths of fish, represent a craving for the sky or the sea visible at a distance, a longing to escape from the desert, a desire to fly or to swim, and thus perhaps especially the thirst for liberation. Fish and sea can point to the fisherfolk and other coastal populations. Both population segments - bedouins and fisherfolk - belong today to the most marginalized and impoverished.

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