In 1962 the Egyptian Ministry of Culture initiated an ambitious program that sponsored artists’ travels to Aswan, where the construction of the monumental Aswan High Dam was underway. Their resulting artworks were to join a constellation of state-supported cultural output centering the High Dam as a celebratory symbol of Egypt’s post-colonial modernity, from novels like Son’allah Ibrahim’s Insān al-sadd al-`ālī (Man of the High Dam) (1967) to popular songs like Abdel Halim Hafez’s Ḥikāyat sha`b (The Story of a People) (1960). These travels yielded a rich and remarkably varied body of artworks, spanning from highly abstract interpretation of the dam’s materiality to intimate portraits of the Nubian communities displaced by the redirected Nile waters.
In this talk, we will engage in close looking at the range of artworks produced from artists’ travels to Aswan, with attention to what artists’ choices in style and subject matter might tell us about their observations in Aswan. In doing so, this talk will highlight the alternative narratives of the High Dam’s construction contained within visual art that are otherwise largely absent in textual archival sources.
Sarah Dwider is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University and a research fellow at the American Research Center in Cairo. Her research centers modern art in Egypt with a focus on the intersection of visual art, postcolonial development, and technopolitics in the 1950s and 60s.
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The lecture starts at 6 pm. We work on a first-come, first-served basis as the number of seats is limited. We open our doors at 5:30 and close them at 6:15 or earlier when the lecture room reaches its full capacity. This talk will not be recorded nor livestreamed.
