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Egypt Here and There: The Images and Architectures of National Exhibitions and Pavilions, 1926-1964

Crossing Boundaries Lecture Series

Lecture Date(s)

November 23, 2016 at 6pm

Speaker(s)

Mohamed Elshahed

Moderator(s)

George Awde, Assistant Professor at Painting and Printmaking department

Language

English

Location

The Atrium at VCUarts Qatar

Acknowledgment

Qatar Foundation
Image caption: Courtesy of Mohamed Elshahed

The site in central Cairo where today’s Opera House and Museum of Modern Art are located was once the country’s focal point for exhibiting national modernity. The history of the site captures a pivotal process in Egypt’s modernization: the ways in which Egyptian strategies of self-representation developed over time. In 1898 British colonial authorities held the first agricultural exhibition on the southern part of the uninhabited Gezira Island.

Following the 1919 Revolution, the site was transformed into a stage for the Egyptian government, along with financial institutions and powerful industrialists, to showcase national production in a variety of fields such as agricultural products, as well as industrial goods such as textiles. Over a period of half a century the exhibition site was altered numerous times with permanent and temporary buildings and exhibition halls. This domestic development was paralleled with Egypt’s presence in international exhibitions such as the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs.

In Egypt and abroad the architectures of national exhibitions and pavilions, as well as their circulated images, were powerful tools for communicating Egypt’s modernity and progress to national and international audiences.

In this lecture Mohamed Elshahed examines several examples of Egyptian exhibition architecture between 1926 and 1964, a period framed by the rise and fall of state-led nationalist representations of Egypt.

Cairo University students building an architectural model of the exhibition grounds, published in the Egyptian French language magazine Images, December 1949, Courtesy of Mohamed Elshahed

Biography

Mohamed Elshahed

Architect, Researcher and Writer

@elmoshahed

Mohamed Elshahed is a Cairo-based architect, independent researcher and writer. He is the Curator for the British Museum’s Modern Egypt Project, and has been tasked to build a collection of everyday objects and material culture to represent the country’s historical developments over the past century.

Elshahed teaches architectural history at the American University in Cairo. In 2014-15 he was an Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices post-doctoral fellow at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien. He obtained his doctoral degree from the Middle East Studies Department at New York University.

He is preparing a book manuscript, Revolutionary Modernism? Architecture and the Politics of Transition in Egypt, 1936-1967, that will focus on architecture and urban planning in Egypt before and after the 1952 coup d’état. He is also producing a guide to Cairo’s modern architecture, which will be published by AUC Press. Mohamed has a Bachelor of Architecture from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a Master in Architecture Studies from MIT.

In 2011, Elshahed established Cairobserver.com, a web and print platform for architecture and urban culture in the Egyptian capital and beyond. The project has produced five print publications. Recent curated exhibitions include Surplus! Housing from the Periphery at Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery (2015), and Cairo Now! City Incomplete at Dubai
Design Week (2016).

Public Programming

Nov. 23, 2016 ― 2 to 3:30 PM

Seminar Class by Mohamed Elshahed for VCUarts Qatar Art History students

Nov. 23, 2016 ― 6 to 7 PM

Crossing Boundaries Lecture Series:
'Egypt Here and There: The Images and Architectures of National Exhibitions and Pavilions, 1926-1964' by Mohamed Elshahed

Video

Except of 'Egypt Here and There: The Images and Architectures of National Exhibitions and Pavilions, 1926-1964' by Mohamed Elshahed

Except of 'Egypt Here and There: The Images and Architectures of National Exhibitions and Pavilions, 1926-1964' by Mohamed Elshahed

Except of 'Egypt Here and There: The Images and Architectures of National Exhibitions and Pavilions, 1926-1964' by Mohamed Elshahed

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