The Jameel Fellowship programme invites contemporary artists and designers from the Middle East to spend time in residence at the V&A, as part of the Middle East section in the Asia Department. Focused on investigation rather than making, the Fellowships support the development of new lines of enquiry in the Fellows’ work, facilitating artistic research in conversation with the V&A’s extraordinary collections.
Ever since I left Egypt, I have been contemplating my relationship with my heritage, perhaps to heal my disrupted sense of belonging. In my newly adopted home in Europe, I found solace in museums. There, I could project my experiences of homesickness, migration, and longing onto familiar objects similarly situated in unfamiliar surroundings. Initially, I thought that as I wandered through museum hallways, I was the one seeking listening ears. Soon, I realised that within these vitrines were storytellers eager to reveal their histories to those willing to look beyond their beautiful surfaces. And beautiful things fill the rooms of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
I spent six weeks at the V&A in South Kensington, listening to these storytellers within the museum’s collections. Though especially immersed in two conversations, many whispers echoed in the corridors, calling upon me. I often found myself before a glass vitrine in the Jewellery Room, where thirteen miniature Egyptian amulets are displayed. These golden and blue faience earrings and pendants –depicting gods and goddesses like Taweret, Sekhmet, and Anubis – offered spiritual protection to my ancestors. The museum label reads, “Protective amulets taking the shape of gods, animals or various symbols were often placed in tombs.” Most Egyptian antiquities here are, in fact, archaeological finds removed from grave contexts. Their removal often involved cutting, tearing, unwrapping, and desecrating the dead. With such violent origins, shouldn’t looking at these amulets provoke discomfort? Or at least disrupt the fascination with their aesthetic qualities?
For a while, I have questioned how this discomfort has been muted. My interest in the implications of viewing funerary objects as artworks began three years ago during a residency at the Sainsbury Centre. There, I interrogated how my eyes were coaxed into adopting the gaze of the art collectors who previously owned the collection on display. At the V&A, my gaze was different; I found myself drawn to the materials: how things were shaped, moulded, woven, and ornamented. To understand this way of seeing, I explored the historical context in which the V&A was founded.
I learned that the museum’s core collection mostly originates from the 1851 Great Exhibition, a spectacle meant to elevate British manufacturing and refine public taste while showcasing the wealth and power of the British Empire. This legacy remains visible in the museum’s structure, where regional displays echo the geographical colonial reach of empire. Expecting consequently a dedicated space for Ancient Egyptian artefacts like in most museums, I instead encountered them – miniatures and modest in size – scattered across the museum’s material-focused galleries. The absence of colossal statues spoke to a broader movement of artefacts between the V&A and the British Museum, leaving the V&A with a selection carefully curated to emphasise a narrative of artistic mastery. Often placed at gallery entrances, these small funerary pieces marked, problematically, the beginning of a developmental journey culminating in Western works. This arrangement reflected the imperial narrative of progress and superiority the Great Exhibition sought to promote.
I saw these imperial legacies likewise in some objects in the collection. One example is a painting by Cooper Willyams, a chaplain who served on a British ship during the campaign against Napoleon’s forces in Egypt. Willyams’ work shows Ottoman captains smoking pipes behind a sinking ship during the 1799 battle of Aboukir, which the French ultimately won. I had seen that battle portrayed from a French perspective while working on an earlier project about Napoleon’s Egyptian conquest. In his painting, Antoine Jean- Gros places Napoleon at the centre, with defeated Ottomans and Egyptians beneath him, naked or wrapped in exotic garments. Juxtaposing these views in a diptych collage set against a Parisian street named after the battle, I saw how both wartime opponents othered and ridiculed Egyptians to assert their superiority.
Being invited as a Jameel fellow was a great opportunity to explore artistic approaches for making these imperial legacies visible. With only six weeks, I had to be selective. Working closely with curator Ben Hinson, I focused on my encounter with the collection of late antique Egyptian textiles – fragments yearning to speak of the violence they had experienced. Simultaneously, with curator Fiona Rogers, I delved into the photographic archives of British architect K.A.C. Creswell, whose images silently witnessed a revolution unfolding outside their frames.
Surrounded by hundreds of books on Asian and Middle Eastern art in the V&A library, I examined photographs of the museum’s Egyptian textile collection. These delicate, fraying fragments, some still bearing faint traces of black resin from mummification, evoked a deep emotional response in me. They weren’t just remnant of cloth; they had once wrapped the dead.
I ran my fingers over the printed images, drawn to the tears, holes, and frayed edges surrounding the embroidered details. Wanting to understand what these funerary textiles endured, I retraced how they arrived at the museum’s storage facility. I learned about the large-scale exhumation of late antique cemeteries in Egypt during the 1880s and 1890s. I read about men like Henry Wallis, Flinders Petrie, and Albert Gayet, who excavated burial sites, then gave or sold to hundreds of torn pieces to museums. Figures like Greville Chester, who condemned the destruction of Egyptian sites while seeing himself as a heritage saviour, were commissioned by the V&A to collect and preserve textiles amongst other things. Women collectors like Edith Rawnsley and Fannie Thomas also contributed personal textile collections to the museum.
At the time, European museums were rapidly expanding their collections, fuelling a growing antiquities market. Entire garments once carefully wrapped around bodies were torn apart, commodified, catalogued, and preserved as artworks. The desecration of graves echoed the violence of imperial extraction and the steep cost at which cultural heritage was acquired – through rupture.
With, Suturing Wounds, I sought to counter the violence inflicted upon these textiles and the bodies stripped of the fabrics meant to protect them. I printed the photographs of all textiles from one cemetery onto fabric, liberating them as tangible facsimiles to be touched again. I then embarked on a lengthy stitching process, reassembling them as a tunic – an act of mourning, healing, and defiance against their fragmentation. Wearing the tunic before the V&A’s storage facility, where the original textiles were kept, I stood as a symbolic memorial headstone, honouring those unknown ancestors of mine whose graves were violated. It was a silent protest against rupture, an embodied refusal to their confinement as delicate objects to be preserved and merely looked at.
While listening to the voices woven into textiles, another conversation unfolded in parallel with the photographic archives. In the Prints and Drawings Study Room, I opened archival boxes containing Creswell’s topographical photographs of Egypt. The sepia-toned prints unsettled me, especially the faint presence of Egyptians tucked in the corners of the frames. From this discomfort, Piercing the Architectural Frame emerged.
Between 1916 and 1921, Creswell roamed Egypt as a British army captain and inspector of monuments, tasked with documenting early Islamic architecture. His survey is invaluable, especially as many of the buildings he captured were later demolished or altered. I felt an urgency to reframe his widely celebrated work within its colonial context – shaped by hierarchies, silences, and an imperial gaze.
Creswell’s photography coincided with a turbulent chapter in Egyptian history, under British protectorate rule, when millions of Egyptians were conscripted to sustain the empire’s war efforts. Though I had seen Egyptian films about the 1919 revolution as a teenager, engaging with archival research, wondering whether my own family participated in the protests, made the events more painful and personal. The mass marches, civil disobedience, and violent suppression I uncovered contrasted sharply with the few surviving photographs from that period, mostly of peaceful gatherings or funerals. This selective record reflects British censorship and the colonial logic dictating what photographers like Creswell deemed worthy of documentation: the built environment.
I saw how Creswell’s empty architectural views, occasionally pierced by Egyptians, both document and erase – perpetuating the separation of contemporary Egyptians, their daily lives, and struggles from the landscapes they inhabit. To admire these photographs without acknowledging their colonial framing is to overlook the lived experiences they obscure. In response, I juxtaposed them with a multiplication of the scarce archival photographs I found of the revolution. Through a series of collages, I wanted to reclaim the visibility of the marginalised, both visually and historically. No longer mere scale references, Egyptians in masses overtake the built structures. Coupled with poetry from the time by Sayed Darwish, Hafez Ibrahim, and Ahmad Shawqi, my interventions disrupt the colonial hierarchies embodied in Creswell’s archive and recentre the voices that were always there, however outside the frame.
With these two works, I invite those drawn to museums and archives, like myself, to see beyond what is visible and listen to what remains unspoken within the folds of fabric and the margins of photographs.
