Wael Shawky

28 Jun-28 Sep 2025

Overview

Wael Shawky’s solo exhibition in 2025 will expand across all of Talbot Rice Gallery’s contemporary and neoclassical galleries. Shawky’s penetrating historical analysis will be explored through dramatic retellings of the past, including Drama 1882, which was created for the Egyptian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. This operatic film tells the story of the nationalist Urabi revolution, a dramatic café-fight in Alexandria in the summer of 1882, and the resulting conflict that led to Britain’s occupation of Egypt until 1956, protecting its investment in the Suez Canal. Shawky’s piercing film, produced in an historic theatre in Alexandria with a vibrant set design and stunning libretto and score, will premiere in the UK at a time of widening historical reckoning for former colonial empires. 

The live performances in Drama 1882 carry forward the stilted movements of the marionettes in his celebrated trilogy, Cabaret Crusades, which re­count the history of the Crusades from an Arab perspective. Wael Shawky has created a wholly unique visual language around his practice, and an incisive commentary on political histories that create cavernous holes in the authority of the past.

Weaving together a number of Shawky’s large-scale film productions, sculptures (many of which have featured in his films) and drawings, the exhibition will celebrate an extraordinary artist, and through extended academic research, honour the Byzantine and Islamic Art Historian who gave the gallery its name 50 years ago – David Talbot Rice. The exhibition of Wael Shawky will welcome the dawn of the next 50 years of Talbot Rice Gallery’s future – part of a global discourse on art and cultural politics, reflective of the past and its neoclassical estate in Edinburgh, and committed to artistic and curatorial practices that engage with issues in the world (and world histories) that effect every one of us.

Wael Shawky was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1971 where he lives and works, and where, in 2010, he founded MASS Alexandria, an independent nonprofit school for contemporary art, offering spaces for studio work, interdisciplinary research, and critical thinking ed­ucation. Recent solo exhibitions include the Pavilion of Egypt at La Biennale di Venezia (2024); Pompeii Archaeological Park, Italy (2023); M Leuven, Belgium (2022); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, USA (2021); Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAE (2020); ARoS - Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2018); Yinchaun Museum of Contemporary Art, China (2017); Castello di Rivoli, Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy (2016); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2016); Fondazione Merz, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); MATHAF, Doha, Qatar (2015) and MoMA P.S.1, New York, NY, USA (2015); K20 Düsseldorf, Germany (2014-15); Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2013-14); KW Contemporary Art Institute, Berlin, Germany (2012). Wael Shawky participated in the 14th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2015); the 11th Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2013); Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012); the 9th Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2012); SITE Santa Fe Biennial, NM, USA (2008); the 9th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2005); and the 50th Venice Biennale, Italy (2003).