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In the animated film Stop - You Will Be Killed, Egyptian Amal Kenawy weaves together photographs, drawings and sound into an intense, dynamic whole. After photographs of bare white spaces of an abandoned military hospital, the film continues with a stream of thought that reflect the artist’s impressions after a visit there. Like in a bad dream, appearing in a ground plan of the hospital is an image of a lifeless female body, a rat starting to gnaw at it. A purple ink splat – or is it blood? – runs out until her whole face is covered. And in there too, just for an instant, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus becomes visible. Through the use of symbols and via a deliberate choice of colors, Kenawy translates her own impressions into a universal visual language that an instinctive reading of her work demands. What she shows in Stop - You Will Be Killed, can still best be described as the essence of violence and war, without literally referring to any one specific conflict. To avoid enlisting actual war victims, Kenawy uses herself as model. In this way the artist goes beyond the particular, and her works take on a timeless and borderless character. “If you critically look at human experience, this is what we’re left with: a universal language that surpasses the whole of political, religious or cultural domains. What it comes down to in the end is what we feel during our lives.”