“This is about my father. This is about me. This is about our hidden room.”

Our Hidden Room is a photographic and narrative project that tells the fragmented story of a complex yet deeply loving relationship between the artist and his father, who was also a photographer. Blending photography and storytelling, the work unfolds as a raw and intimate exploration of family, memory, and loss.

During the artist’s childhood in Egypt, his father often behaved erratically and withdrew from the world, becoming increasingly obsessed with a small, dark hidden room within the family home. This space both physical and psychological became a site of solitude, fixation, and unspoken struggle. Living with bipolar disorder at a time when mental illness was poorly understood and heavily stigmatised, the father’s condition went largely unacknowledged, ultimately leading to his suicide.

Across six chapters, the project traces the father’s life from a difficult childhood in an orphanage in Alexandria to his service in the Egyptian Army, where he discovered photography as both an artistic practice and a form of refuge. Through a deeply personal lens, the artist reflects on resilience, inherited trauma, and the silence surrounding mental illness. Photography, once a source of pain and conflict within the family, becomes a means of reckoning and healing for the artist transforming loss into meaning and preserving memory as an act of love. Our Hidden Room stands as a testament to the power of art to bear witness, to hold tenderness and pain in the same frame, and to find beauty even in absence.

Born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1984, Mohamed Hassan relocated to Wales in 2007. He studied photography at Carmarthen School of Art in 2016 and went on to complete an MA in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales in 2023. In recent years, his work has been included in several significant group exhibitions, notably Facing Britain: British Documentary Photography since the 1960s, curated by Ralph Goertz and presented at multiple venues across Europe.
His photographs are held in major public collections, including the National Museum of Wales, the Government Art Collection, the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Historic England, and the National Library of Wales. His first photo-book was published this year, with work from the publication exhibited in Italy, Slovenia, and Paris.

Our Hidden Room tells the fragmented story of the complex but loving relationship between the author and his father, also a photographer. During the author’s youth in Egypt, his father often behaved erratically and reclusively, becoming increasingly obsessed with a small, dark hidden room in the family home. His father suffered from bipolar disorder and, at a time when mental health issues were not widely understood, this ultimately led to his suicide.