Home Outside of Home

The first Egyptian mummified body brought to Holland arrived in the early sixteenth century. Some five hundred years later, I moved to live there. Homesick, I found myself searching for Egypt in my new Western home. Strangely enough, I needed not to look for long.

Egyptian obelisks, statues, temples, and mummies are nowadays found all over the world. They continue to be excavated, dug up, packed, and shipped to Europe, where they become objects in archives accumulated to promote a western narrative of imperial conquest. As I kept meeting my ancestors across European cities, I began questioning the politics of these collections and their impact on how we, Egyptians, relate to our heritage. I wondered: If the artefacts could speak, what would they say?

With this ongoing body of work, I scrutinise the western obsession with Egypt during the early nineteenth century, known as Egyptomania, and its contemporary legacies. Sparked by Napoleon’s Egyptian conquest, this fascination resulted in European cities with obelisks in squares, sphinxes on buildings, and mummies in cinemas. Drawing on my personal experience emigrating from Egypt and the homesickness accompanying it, I offer with this work a counter-narrative reclaiming my heritage and protesting its colonial framing.

By projecting my feelings onto displaced Egyptian artefacts in Europe, I portray these as narrators similarly longing for their ancestral home. Through their personification, I start a dialogue about the historical and contemporary meanings of their presence in European landscapes and collections, which is typically absent from the public discourse.