Camoufleur’s Dummy, No. 1

Camoufleur’s Dummy, No. 1 draws from the Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate, established by the British military in Egypt in 1941. During WWII, enlisted artists devised theatrical illusions and fabricated landscapes to deceive aerial and military technologies. A modular tank constructed from discarded fruit crates and draped in textile confronts the camoufleur’s tank dummy as an apparatus of spectacle.

Credits

Made in collaboration with Mañana Carpintería

Heba Y. Amin

Heba Y. Amin (1980, Cairo) engages with political themes and archival histories through film, photography, performance and installation. Her speculative and often satirical practice questions narratives of conquest and control, using the deconstruction of images to unsettle how history is produced and understood.

Amin is a professor of Digital and Time-Based Art at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart (ABK Stuttgart), co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, and visual arts curator for the journal Mizna. She was awarded the 2025 Hans-Molfenter Preis/City of Stuttgart Art Prize, the 2022 Nordhorn City Art Prize, the 2020 Sussmann Artist Award for artists committed to democracy and antifascism, and the 2019 NYC Field of Vision Fellowship.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Fondazione Merz (Turin), Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai), S A V V Y Contemporary (Berlin), Museum Arnhem (Netherlands), Mosaic Rooms (London), Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), Musée du quai Branly (Paris), MAXXI (Rome), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), and Kunsthalle Bremen (Germany), as well as at the Liverpool, Berlin, Istanbul, Dakar and Raša biennials.

Her monograph Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork, edited by Anthony Downey, was published by Sternberg Press in 2020. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Intercept and the BBC. She is also one of the artists behind the infamous graffiti intervention on the set of the television series Homeland.