Breast Cancer Portrait Project The Fighters Opens at Darb 1718

A powerful long-term photography and textile project exploring women’s lived experiences with breast cancer will open this month at Darb 1718 Contemporary Art and Culture Center in Cairo.

The Fighters Face to Face, by visual storyteller Sara Younes, brings together more than a year of close collaboration with thirteen women living with breast cancer. 

Through portrait photography, embroidery, and personal testimony, the project presents an intimate narrative of how illness reshapes a woman’s relationship with her body, identity, and the world around her.

Curated by Melanie Partamian, the exhibition opens on December 17, 2025, at 7 PM and runs until December 30. The works transform individual pain into a collective expression of resilience, recognition, and shared strength.

Younes printed the portraits on fabric and invited participants to stitch directly onto their images using surgical threads, the same material used in medical procedures. 

The fragile, dissolvable nature of the thread reflects the uncertainty of healing and memory, turning each work into a tactile bodily archive. Each stitched portrait becomes a second skin, blurring the boundary between image and body and creating a space for remembrance and recovery.

Partamian describes the exhibition as an encounter grounded in attentiveness rather than observation, emphasizing that the women are not medical subjects but authors of their own visual narratives. The exhibition invites audiences to engage with the works through presence, care, and empathy.

The project is co-organized by the Czech Centres, the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Cairo, and the Baheya Foundation, with support from PFNonwovens Linet. It was inspired by the original Face to Face initiative in Czechia by photographer Vladimír Kožíšek.

As it opens to the public, The Fighters Face to Face offers a rare space where vulnerability and resilience stand side by side, affirming the power of contemporary art to hold complex human experience without reduction.