Why Egypt is suddenly on the global art world’s radar
With the Grand Egyptian Museum open and Alexandria’s biennial returning, Egypt is positioning itself as a regional cultural force. But its most compelling artistic energy comes from independent voices and overlooked institutions.
There are a few moments in my life that I can call cultural resets. One of the most memorable was when, on a hot summer morning in May 2023, I encountered Egyptian artist Maha Maamoun’s work for the first time. Fresh out of a gruelling degree in Toronto, I had fled to Manhattan to visit the museums. At The Met, tucked into gallery 914, was Maamoun’s eight-minute video “2026” (2010), alongside her photographic series “Domestic Tourism I” (2005). It dawned on me that Egypt is a tourist spectacle, even for those of us who grew up there.
In the video, Maamoun recreates a scenario from Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée, a story about a man journeying back in time in post-apocalyptic Paris. In Maamoun’s version, an actor delivers an excerpt from Mahmoud Osman’s science-fiction novel, The Revolution of 2053: The Beginning (2007). The text describes a night by the pyramids on a sanitised Giza Plateau with nothing in sight but the Grand Egyptian Museum (Gem). Initially proposed in 1992 and later formalised through an international design competition in 2002, the Gem was still under construction when Maamoun conceived “2026”. In the piece, the actor describes scenes of great wealth and food alongside images of superbly dressed expats and tourists dining leisurely. The scene is abruptly juxtaposed with deprivation, as starving children receive aid from an armoured car. I remember feeling uneasy after those eight minutes; I felt the hollowness of the museum’s spectacle on a visceral level.
In 2018, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism launched Egypt – Experience & Invest: an initiative promoting culture as a tool for attracting visitors and investment. The campaign arrived two years before the closure of Townhouse Gallery, a vital independent contemporary-art space founded in 1998 by Canadian expat and long-time Cairo resident William Wells, who was expelled from Egypt in 2020. From a modest alleyway in downtown Cairo, Townhouse nurtured a generation of artists including Wael Shawky, now artistic director of Art Basel Qatar, and Maamoun herself.
Experience Egypt champions initiatives such as Art Cairo, Cairo Photo Week and Art d’Égypte, a cultural firm that seeks to connect Egyptian art with the world. The firm touts “a three-billion global reach, three-million exhibition views and more than 10,000 cultural conversations”. Those figures are unsurprisingly unsubstantiated. But it’s also unclear what they mean. What is a cultural conversation, exactly?
At its 2025 edition, Art d’Égypte staged a monumental show by the pyramids. The only Egyptian artist featured was ceramicist Salha El Masry, whose work, the firm says, draws from the country’s pre-dynastic past – a dazzling display, yet hardly a speck of Cairo’s dust in sight.
Art d’Égypte’s downtown satellite, the Cairo International Art District (CIAD), is in the same quarter that was once home to Townhouse. Al Ismaelia for Real Estate Development owns the spaces, whose CEO declared at CIAD’s press launch that “art has the power to transform how people see heritage.” The restored El Shorbagy building, where the selected works align perfectly with the branded wallpaper, is a remarkable example of Welsh-inspired medieval architecture. On the rooftop, visitors are invited to pose before a billboard that shouts, “AN ARTIST LIVES IN EVERYONE”.
The Gem, which finally opened on 1 November, is a colossal undertaking. After more than 20 years of planning, the mammoth institution designed by Irish firm Heneghan Peng Architects, contains more than 50,000 artefacts spanning 5,000 years of civilisation and markets itself as the largest museum in the world dedicated to ancient Egypt. Upon entry, you’re greeted by an 83-tonne sculpture of the pharaoh Ramses II that once stood in Cairo’s Ramses Square, in front of the central railway station. The Ministry of Tourism insists that the Gem will offer a wholly new experience of Egyptian heritage. During the Gem’s opening week, my social-media feeds were saturated with AI-generated content from its official accounts.
Coinciding with the Gem’s opening is the announcement of the Alexandria Biennale’s return in 2026 after a 12-year hiatus. Its wistful theme, This Too Shall Pass, focuses on environmental issues, with the entire city set to become an open exhibition space. Egypt’s culture minister has stressed that art is integral to Alexandria’s identity, and that reinstating the biennial will have a significant impact on instilling aesthetic ideals in its youth. Yet, meaningful cultural institutions in Alexandria have long struggled to stay afloat. Among them, Mass Alexandria, founded by Wael Shawky and curator Sarah Rifky, offered seminars in art history, criticism and contemporary practice from 2010 to 2012, modestly addressing Egypt’s art-education gap. Briefly revived in 2016, Mass graduated a cohort that included Marianne Fahmy and Yasmine El Meleegy, who exhibited with Cairo’s Gypsum Gallery at this year’s Frieze London.
For the past decade, state-led initiatives have been funnelling money into rebranding the nation as a global art destination – a process that often smooths over its artistic and social realities. Egypt’s most vital institutions still lie beneath the surface.
