Art Need Not Be a Manifesto

I was in my early 30s at the time and had been writing and publishing in one form or another for 15 years by then, since my late teens, mostly for Egyptian readers. My focal preoccupation had been largely on the arts—film, architecture, and contemporary art—which by default was influenced by the politics of my country. During Hosni Mubarak’s reign, so much of what was said or left unsaid in our collective visual vocabulary was dictated by a police state that interrogated everything from street art for its possible anti-authoritarian symbolism to the mere atmosphere of a film for whether it might possibly have undertones of dissent.

Against this backdrop, my essays and criticism were never overtly political in addressing a political system or process. My life and the prism through which I considered the visual arts were markedly apolitical. This wasn’t a conscious undertaking, but rather a function of survival in a culture where most Egyptians were socialized to swallow political thoughts or inclinations. Visual art, and the conversation with it, needed to be cautious.

The revolution of 2011 upended this hypervigilance, unfurling decades of unspoken grievances. In the face of an unforgiving security state, the long-standing barrier of fear had been broken: artists, writers, filmmakers, and even citizens with no previous impulse for creative articulation were expressing their hopes, fears, dreams, and anger. In as much as aspirations become political when they are in opposition to the state, political thought turned from privately held and fiercely guarded ideas to a tangible, visible, sometimes musical, often visual part of the everyday. Two thousand eleven and the several years following were an artistic heyday with a noticeable uptick in art production.

This shared political awakening effectively designated every creative act as an inevitable note in a political dramaturgy that has now been classified by those who partook in it as “revolutionary” or “counter-revolutionary.” Revolution is ongoing even in the face of its defeat, making it impossible to extricate political readings from visual culture despite the return to an oppressive state, extreme censorship, and a reinstated caution on the part of artists. Within this context, a film becomes a reading of an artist’s political stance. Tone takes on new meaning, and narrative decisions are scrutinized more for political choice than for story, climax, or audience appeal. In this climate, a film about refugees takes the moral temperature of its maker. A video installation that insinuates corruption becomes a measure of an artist’s integrity and resolve. A photograph is criticized for political apathy rather than considered for the larger body of work and philosophical underpinnings of its creator.

I fell into this algorithm of critique myself and have spent the larger part of the past decade thinking about art, films in particular, in these political terms. As an Egyptian, African, Middle Eastern writer, now largely writing for international publications, I also most often feel that I am expected to assess Middle Eastern art as a gauge of revolutionary politics or its moral deficit. To be accepted, I must occupy a public, partisan stance as a creative maker who mirrors Western political ideals and addresses their long-held critiques of my government and culture. This is the prism through which our work—as artists in the broadest sense across genres and mediums—is considered and given merit. This is our service value, a circumscribed political gesture.

It is within this paradigm of expectations that I find myself thinking about the work of the Egyptian visual artist and filmmaker Wael Shawky, specifically his film-based work Drama 1882 (2024), which he produced for the Egyptian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Shawky has long been politically engaged with the history of colonialism, religious systems, and empire. His filmic oeuvre is vast, including short films, such as his 12.45-minute The Cave (2005), in which he takes up center frame, walking through a supermarket in Amsterdam dressed impeccably in a velvet blazer, poker-faced. Without pause he recites Surah Al-Kahf from the Quran, the tale of a group of persecuted men who hide in a cave, stirring from their sleep 309 years later to a completely transformed world. The work is a startling inversion of the story, juxtaposing the artist and his meditative recital with the neon-flooded aisles of the product-filled emporium. In a similar ethos, his 2006 Al-Aqsa Park is a black-and-white animation that transposes the majestic and historically fraught Jerusalem mosque into a spinning, tilting, fun-fair-like ride.

In 2009, Shawky spent a month in Jordan interviewing Palestinian refugees. He found that people seemed to speak to him in storylines and a vocabulary appropriated from the media—simplified, flattened versions of tragic, often horrifying events. His subsequent 10-minute Larvae Channel 2 (2009) is a rotoscope animation of one elderly couple, reduced to a looped, scratchy background noise, which speaks metaphorically to the ongoing cycles of dispossession, grief, despair, and ultimately—with this language robbed of meaning—of resilience. The Cabaret Crusades (2010-2014) trilogy followed, inspired by Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades through Arab Eyes, offering a filmed retelling of the crusades from an Arab viewpoint, using marionettes. Until this year’s Biennale, these elaborate, multilayered films with their accompanying installations were the works for which Shawky was perhaps best known.

Drama 1882 continues Shawky’s tradition of filmed renditions that intervene in the gaps of the most widely held accounts of major historical events. Set in Alexandria, the eight-part, 40-minute operatic film takes as its starting point a dramatic series of events that unfolded in the city that year. Eighteen eighty-two marked the end of a nationalist movement that began in 1879 to upend corruption and the imperial influence of Britain and France over Egypt, led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi, who climbed military ranks from peasant-hood and eventually founded the Egyptian Nationalist Party to secure “Egypt for the Egyptians.” The film retells a sequence of events that occurred in the summer of 1882 to implode Urabi’s popular movement and precipitate the full-scale bombardment of Alexandria by British forces, culminating in the historic Battle of Tel El Kebir and Urabi’s ultimate capture and exile.

Filmed in an Alexandrian theater against the backdrop of handmade painterly sets and period costumes, Shawky choreographs his cast to a mesmerizing musical dialogue that he scripted and scored himself. His characters move in slow motion, rocking back and forth as they cross the stage, singing, faces blank, absent of emotion. The film—which could also be a theater piece in its first iteration—centers its narrative on a well-documented café fight that erupted when an Egyptian donkey-keeper and a Maltese man disagreed over a journey fare. The fight turned into riots that overtook Alexandria, leaving 300 people dead and the city a site of devastation. The question, which Shawky raises without ever stating it overtly, is whether that fight was extemporaneous or premeditated by the British, who had their troops on standby in nearby Cyprus and Malta, to justify their subsequent attack and occupation.

It would be short-sighted to consider the film simply a nod to Egyptian history and the country’s occupation by the British. Shawky was invited by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture to represent the Biennale’s Egyptian Pavilion last September, but by the time he negotiated his terms and an agreement was signed, it was well past the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, and Israel was relentlessly bombing Gaza in retaliation. The film’s bottom line is that it calls into question notions of truth, complicating Western war narratives and demanding critical consideration of revisionist histories of colonization told from the imperialist point of view. In this way, it becomes an allegory for Israeli occupation. This is part of Shawky’s ongoing repertoire—retelling history from the Arab perspective.

I’ve known Shawky for many years, and Western critics and friends who know of our relationship have repeatedly suggested that by taking up the pavilion and exhibiting work that does not overtly denounce the Egyptian state, Shawky is, in effect, validating the current government, complete with its corruption and abuses of human rights and power. My retort has been twofold. On the one hand, there is the obvious question of whether American, British, and German artists are being held to these same standards, of being seen as validating their governments’ positions supporting the genocide by putting work up in their national pavilions. On the other is the question of why the West thinks they are the moral gatekeepers and judges of Middle Eastern, Arab, African artists.

Venice presents artists with the biggest platform their work will perhaps ever be offered, and Shawky took up the pavilion on the sole condition that there would be no involvement on the part of the state, going so far as to finance the elaborate work entirely himself. His ambition was to provoke an extensive audience to question an occupying force’s invasion, coded as self-defense. Although Drama 1882 did not overtly address the current political climate in Egypt, Shawky quite boldly made statements about the post-2011 return to dictatorship in his many interviews during Venice with the press. And while sound and image as carefully put-together constructs inherently express positions towards the world, certainly in Shawky’s work it seems critical at this fraught political moment of extreme polarization, scrutiny, and cancel culture to remind ourselves that film is not always a manifesto. Art need not always make a direct, contemporaneous political statement to hold value, space, or be of consequence.

These thoughts on cultural soft power and moral and political gatekeeping are at the forefront of my mind as I work on my current book project, which tells the story of a filmmaker indexing a found archive of material about an unnamed city. Like all my work, the book is as personal as it is political, but it is also far from the type of narrative that fits the tropes international publishers have come to expect or desire of writers like me. Rather than choosing the usual safe route this time, of trying to secure a contract for publication based on early chapters, I am taking a page out of Shawky’s practice with Drama 1882, of giving myself complete free rein, letting this book define and complete itself, in its own time, and trusting in the integrity of the work to chart the outcome of that process in finding the right readership.