At the 60th Venice Biennale, Wael Shawky Invites Us to Reflect on Past Fictions and Myths

“This fight started the whole issue,” says Shawky. “Because one month later, Britain decided to occupy Egypt, saying that they have to protect their subjects.”

At the time, Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire and ruled by the Khedive Tewfik, but the empire was weak and the country, suffering from corruption and financial ruin. Ahmed Urabi, a colonel in the Egyptian army, led a revolt against the monarch and, by extension, the foreign powers. In a historic moment, the Battle of Tell El Kebir, European forces defeated Urabi’s fighters and Britain began its seven decades-long colonization. Today, Urabi is widely remembered as a national hero.

Shawky wanted to create a stage for this history, so he turned it into a musical theater play, directed, choreographed, and composed by him. The play has eight scenes, each telling part of the story, including Urabi’s battles, the fight happening in Alexandria, and a colonial conference in Istanbul where six countries fought over the rights to enter Egypt. For the Egyptian Pavilion, he rendered the story into the film Drama 1882.

In his research-based multimedia practice, which spans film, music, performance, painting and sculpture, Shawky explores notions of national, religious and artistic identity. His work narrates stories that interlace fact, fiction and fable, and which are inspired by historiographical and literary references.

“Instead of trying to comment on what’s happening today in the economy or in politics, I prefer to go back to 1000 years ago and try to make a translation for written history, to think of it as human creation,” he says.

When he was invited to represent Egypt in Venice, he initially wanted to show a project he had made in Pompeii, reflecting on the creation of the universe at the intersection of Greek and Egyptian mythology. “But then, after a lot of discussion, I thought that it’d be more appropriate to analyze our contemporary political situation in Egypt and the region by going back to 1882.”

In Drama 1882, he was interested in analyzing the moment right before British colonization. “Because of the written analysis today, everybody thinks that the fight was already planned. But we don’t know and we’ll never know,” he says. “This is the history I like to talk about, where we don’t know what the myth is. This is the gap in which I create the artwork.”

Shawky’s presentation at the Egyptian Pavilion offers an important interpretation of this year’s La Biennale theme: Foreigners Everywhere. “This theme carries a lot of debate. I like the simplicity of it, it’s very interesting,” he says. “From the point of view of someone living in Egypt now, if someone from Europe is saying ‘foreigners everywhere,’ does it mean the same to me? Absolutely not.”

He expands: “In this film, foreigners are occupiers, not immigrants. During 1882, Britain was really everywhere. It was almost normal that all these first-world countries occupied other countries. Today, even though there are a lot of foreigners in Europe, they are not occupiers. We know that in the end, the authority is not in the hands of the migrants.”

In the Egyptian Pavilion, Drama 1882 is accompanied by vitrines, sculpture, paintings, drawings and a mirror relief made in Murano. The conversations Shawky hopes to spark are around questioning how we frame reality based on our telling of events.

“In the end, I don't believe in this history. I believe that translating this history into a different format allows us to analyze it,” he explains. “I don’t think it would be possible to present Urabi, the leader of the army, as a hero today, if we were not controlled by the army.”

He gives the example of Egypt’s main newspaper Al-Ahram labeling Urabi a terrorist after he was arrested. “History is written by the winners. In 1882, nobody condemned the British for what they did, or what the French did to Algeria. And it’s not about saying this is good or bad, it’s just about analyzing how someone like Urabi was a terrorist one day, and then was a hero.”

The Egyptian Pavilion will open to the public on April 20, 2024. Opening concurrently with the Biennale, Shawky's 2023 musical film I Am Hymns of the New Temples will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Museo di Palazzo Grimani.

In this film, he takes a different approach to a similar idea: trying to get to the core of what justice means to societies, and how our understanding of it changes or is influenced by our worship of power.

Hearing Shawky recount this revolutionary history and his observations of its afterlives, I get the sense that he is truly an artist of the people, a creative mind that offers itself as a mirror to how we live and think. He is proud to be representing his country at this time of upheaval, and humbly says: “It’s extremely important for me and I just hope that I can say something meaningful in the end.”