If you think a filmed opera sung entirely in classical Arabic that tells, in detail, the complex story of a relatively obscure, failed 19th-century uprising in Egypt might be something less than compelling, do I have news for you.
Since the Venice Biennale opened in April, “Drama 1882,” a 45-minute video at the heart of an installation by the Alexandria-based artist Wael Shawky, has been mesmerizing visitors to the Egyptian Pavilion. When I went in mid-June, long after the art world insiders had left, I watched as tourists wandered into the dark space and after a moment or two parked themselves on the floor and on benches, seduced by the candy-colored, almost cartoonish stage sets, a richly melodious score, slow-motion, stylized choreography and even a real donkey.
The images are indelible: groups of soldiers sway and swoon in perfect synchronicity; top-hatted ambassadors from European powers squat barefoot on a tilted table or hang off its edges while discussing the fate of the Middle East; dancing girls tempt a drunkard in a tavern. But despite the surrealism of the visuals, the historical facts — they’re legit.
Shawky, 53, has made a name for himself in global art exhibitions like Documenta and the Sharjah and Istanbul Biennials by turning to the past to reframe our understanding of the present, often through filmed performances featuring marionettes, live actors in oversize masks, or even children. Some of his works retell classic stories — about the Crusades, or the expulsion of Muslim Arabs from Europe — that flip the script, as it were, by seeing history through Arab eyes. In 2015, Holland Cotter called “Cabaret Crusades” — three sequential films shown at MoMA PS1 — “truly brilliant.” “The story is one of almost unremitting violence,” he wrote, “which is a surprise considering that all the actors are marionettes.” (Lady Gaga was also a fan.) Equally inventive, “The Song of Roland: The Arabic Version” (2017) brought to life the expulsion of Muslim Arabs from Spain in the eighth century, with singers and musicians from Sharjah and Bahrain performing live in the traditional style of Arabian Gulf pearl divers.
With “Drama 1882,” Shawky uses, film, sculpture and drawing to tell the story of the Urabi Revolt, led by a young military officer from a peasant family whose message of reform resonated with the common people. It purportedly began with the murder of a donkey owner by an anonymous Maltese man and ended with a clash between Alexandrians and British military forces that left around 300 Egyptians dead. The uprising signaled the end of Ottoman control of the region and precipitated British colonial domination of the Middle East for decades, including its 70-year occupation of Egypt.
The film was staged and shot at a theater in Alexandria with a cast of 150 professionals and amateurs. It is the first film on which Shawky worked with unmasked actors, he said in a video interview. “I work with marionettes, kids and masks to avoid the idea of drama in my work. I hate when an actor uses his skills to interpret,” he said.
The actors’ strange, slow-motion movements — flailing arms, stilted walks, measured marches and stiff dances back and forth across the stage — were drawn from his work with puppets. “The performers don’t really have any facial expressions,” he said. “They use their bodies to convey expression, but not their faces — they become like marionettes.”
Shawky attributes the lush coloration and graphic simplicity of his staging to his early study of painting as an undergraduate at Alexandria University. “I looked at each scene of ‘Drama 1882’ as a complete painting,” he told me. “I was looking at every element, every costume, down to each soldier, in a very precise way, in a very painterly way.”
Shawky, who spent part of his childhood in Mecca, where his architect-engineer father worked on modernization products, says that his mother always knew he would be an artist. But a musician, too? Despite the central role it plays in his work, he has no special training in the discipline. “I tried to study music while I was doing my master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, but unfortunately I was very lazy,” he said. He composes on a keyboard before calling in musicians and a music arranger to transform it into a score. “Sometimes I feel that I need people to be very, very patient with me,” he added with a laugh.
The installation is rounded out with a series of sculptures: vitrines that look to be straight out of a fun house, all bent legs and angles, variously filled with Murano glass puppets, fava beans, and cast aluminum plates showing faintly rendered historical images; one glass relief depicting an amber buglike monster dancing on a fort; a large structure of clay, straw, resin, steel, and copper veers between landscape, architecture, and scurrying sand insect.
Shawky considered the subject of this project pertinent to the theme of this year’s Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere.” “When we talk about foreigners, it’s mainly immigrants, right? In Egypt, immigrants are now coming from Syria and Sudan,” he said. “But if you go back to 1882, the foreigners were actually occupiers — they were French, British, Greeks, the subjects of British colonies.”
There are also very deliberate echoes here of a more recent historical upheaval in Egypt — the 2011 revolution, which deposed President Hosni Mubarak and ended decades of single-party rule. He was replaced in 2014 by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former general who in his third term has continued many repressive policies of his predecessor, including media censorship.
“We had hoped for a huge change, and it didn’t happen. It’s now really a dictatorship again,” Shawky said.
No matter how otherworldly or surreal his visual forms, Shawky hews closely to the historical record, often relying on scholarly accounts and archival research. “I even lift actual sentences from the written history,” he said, adding, “even if I don’t really believe it.” That approach allows viewers to see that history is a human creation, he said. “It’s not really something we can rely upon as fact — it’s a form of storytelling.”
By recounting history with puppet shows, operas, cabaret, musicals, Shawky allows for doubt to creep in. “My work is always floating between myth and reality, between doubting history and believing in history,” he said. “As long as there’s a gap in our knowledge, as long as there’s ignorance, we’re still making art.”
“There’s a kind of precision between images and sound and the way that stories are told in Wael’s work,” said Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a curator who has written about the artist and featured him in Documenta 13 in 2012. “He basically just presents chronology — a date, a fact, a date, a fact — and not some grand interpretation.”
When he was approached by the Egyptian ministry of culture to represent his country, Shawky hesitated. The artist had not had an exhibition in his home country since 2010 and had refused to participate in any government-sponsored activities after 2011. (But he remains engaged in the art community in Alexandria. He founded MASS Alexandria, an independent studio program for young artists, in 2010.)
He felt there was a political sea change afoot to tap into: “When I talked to people in the streets, I got the feeling that people were losing trust in the systems and regimes that they used to turn to for answers. I felt that there is big change coming that will happen from people — from us.”
His one condition was that the government allow him to work without any censorship. Since there was very little money in the ministry of culture’s coffers to underwrite the show, Shawky, with the help of his gallerists and a friend, Mai Eldib, was entirely responsible for its fund-raising, from private sources in Egypt.
His only concession to officials was communicating in advance the topic of his project. If they were concerned about Shawky’s pointed allusion to another “failed revolution” in Egyptian history, as he called it, he didn’t hear about it.
Andrea Viliani, who oversees the contemporary art program at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, suggested that Shawky also show a 2023 work that he completed there: “I Am Hymns of the New Temples,” at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani, a 16th-century Venetian palace, not far from the Biennale grounds. The central video — again set to music — features performers in fantastical masks cavorting in the ruins of Pompeii, retelling the Greek myth of the creation of the world.
The masks are on display alongside the Grimani’s archaeological relics. “Why did I use ceramic?” Shawky joked, referring to the actors’ discomfort wearing them. “Terrible! All the performers were really, really, really suffering because we filmed in July.”
Shawky was fascinated to learn that one of the first structures uncovered at Pompeii when 18th-century archaeologists began to excavate it from the layers of ash that descended in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 was a temple dedicated not to any Greek or Roman deity — but to the Egyptian goddess Isis. It was an entry point for the artist to consider the long history of the Mediterranean as a cultural space of religious, linguistic and cultural cross-pollination and coexistence in an era of increasing nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment.
It also allowed him to explore the idea of justice, he said. “The movie ends with Zeus realizing that humanity will never be pure of their sins. They started to worship dictators and power.” In the video, Zeus decides to erase humanity completely.
Though very different than “Drama 1882” — one deals with history, the other mythology, one marks the beginning of modern Egypt, the other tells of ancient pasts — both films hinge on moments of violence and cataclysm that make space for something new, and hopefully more humane.
“This is a film about continuous creation and destruction, collapse and recovery, and the eternal series of destructions that feature in this history of humankind,” Viliani said. “But after destruction, there is always a way to get back to another form of life. Wael reenchants — he creates the possibility of not being hopeless.”
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