Apartment 92026 · Single-user · Free-roaming · Arabic / English · Meta Quest 3 · 8 minutes
Unity, TouchDesigner, and projection mapping
What does it mean to inherit a migration you never chose? Apartment 9 is a mixed reality installation exploring the experience of growing up between places, inheriting a sense of displacement, and trying to make a home out of fragments of memory, stories, and traditions.
Born and raised in Kuwait to Egyptian parents, I grew up with a complicated relationship with Egypt. I fell in love with Egypt because it gave me a sense of stability and safety that I rarely experienced in Kuwait. It is my country, a place I feel connected to through my parents' memories and stories, even though I have relatively few memories of my own.
Kuwait is where I made most of my childhood memories, but being born there to non-Kuwaiti parents didn’t give me a lasting legal claim to it. What I have of Kuwait lives in the memories, relationships, and emotions I left behind and can’t get back to.
This in-between existence, often associated with being a third-culture kid, raises questions about belonging: How do you relate to a place you are expected to call home but did not grow up in?
The installation is a physical, unfinished living room. Through the headset, the room is completed, pieced together from memory, family rituals, familiar sounds, and stories passed down across generations.
Apartment 9 explores the ways a decision made by one generation continues to shape the identity and sense of belonging of the next. It is about the homes we leave, the homes we inherit, and the spaces in between that we learn to inhabit. The work ultimately invites visitors to consider that home is not always a place we choose or a place we can return to. Sometimes, it is something we spend our lives trying to piece together.
Directed by: Dina Khalil
Developed during the Artist in Residence program at Diriyah Art Futures
Crew
- Narrative Designer: Oscar Durand
- Lead 3D Artist: Maya Khalil
- Voice Narrators: Heinar Fahmy (Arabic) and Sarah ElSheryie (English)