Yalla Yalla! See You in Egypt - Exhibition @ Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Yalla Yalla! See You in Egypt

Teylers Museum, Haarlem

19 October 2024 - 9 February 2025

Willem de Famars Testas (1834-1896) 

Streetscape with coffee house in Cairo, ca 1860-1872.

Teylers Museum collection

Image courtesy Teylers Museum

At the exhibition 'Yalla Yalla! See You in Egypt', Teylers Museum puts the work of the nineteenth-century artist Willem de Famars Testas centre stage in a whole new way. The oldest museum in the Netherlands has plotted a journey in the exhibition, in collaboration with Dutch-Egyptian actor and theatre-maker Sabri Saad El-Hamus, prizewinning podcaster Tjitske Mussche and internationally known scenographer and maker Theun Mosk of studio Ruimtetijd. With Testas’s work as its guide, they take visitors along on a journey across the boundaries of time, space and cultures.

Willem de Famars Testas

In 1858, the young and as yet unknown artist Willem de Famars Testas (1834-1896) embarked on a long, life-changing journey to Egypt. The scents, colours, sounds, mosques, the povery, the climate – everything was different, as the diary he kept and the letters he sent also reveal: ‘The hustle and bustle of this place is quite strange: everywhere one meets camels, donkeys and horses, laden with all kinds of things, and also swarms of donkeys, which one sees everywhere with their boys.’ The scenery of this new world inspired him to make paintings, watercolours, sketches and drawings. Many of them are held in the collections of the Rijksmuseum, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Teylers Museum.

Terry van Druten and Sabri Saad El-Hamus 

at a burial chamber in Koerna, Thebe, February 2024

Photography: Tjitske Mussche

Journey to Egypt 2024

Scenes of distant countries were a popular feature of European art in the nineteenth century, but they also convey a certain stereotypical image. How relevant is Testas’s image of Egypt today, and what do we make of his descriptions now?

Curator Terry van Druten – a huge fan of Testas’s work for fifteen years – Sabri Saad El-Hamus and Tjitske Mussche travelled to Egypt in Testas’s footsteps last February. They visited places where Testas made drawings and looked to see how those places had changed. They spoke with Egyptians and with each other about Egypt then and now. Mussche processed their adventures into an audio travelogue focusing on multiple perspectives. Not only Testas’s view of Egypt, but also, for example, El-Hamus’s view of the Netherlands, foreign to him when he first arrived here as a ‘bearer of good fortune’ at the age of 21. Sabri Saad El-Hamus: 'When I read the travel diary, I was surprised by his view of the Egyptians. Sometimes he seems utterly out of touch, or plainly racist. Still, he also says things about Egypt that are true, even today. I also recognized something in him: I, too, had those feelings of alienation and homesickness when I came to the Netherlands as a young man in a completely new world.’

Exhibition

In Theun Mosk’s exciting space – with paintings, drawings, film footage and photographs – visitors to Teylers Museum can listen to dialogues between Van Druten and El-Hamus, and fragments from Testas’s diary, read out by actor Florian Myjer. The music was composed especially for this exhibition by the young composer Youssra El Hawary of Cairo. Testas’s work challenges visitors to make a voyage of discovery in Egypt and encounter ‘the other’ and themselves.

TEYLERS MUSEUM

Spaarne 16, 2011 CH Haarlem

teylersmuseum.nl

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

November 17, 2024 – February 17, 2025

FRED WILSON (American, born 1954) 

Grey Area (Brown Version), 1993 

Brooklyn Museum, 

Bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr. and 

bequest of Richard J. Kempe, by exchange

The major exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now examines how Black artists and other cultural figures have engaged with ancient Egypt through visual, sculptural, literary, musical, scientific, scholarly, religious, political, and performative pursuits. The multisensory exploration of nearly 150 years of artistic and cultural production will feature nearly 200 works of art in a wide range of media from The Met collection and public and private collections, including critical international loans from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe. Thematic sections will trace how Black artists and other agents of culture have employed ancient Egyptian imagery to craft a unifying identity, the contributions of Black scholars to the study of ancient Egypt, and the engagement of modern and contemporary Egyptian artists with ancient Egypt. 

“Ancient Egypt is a symbolic source for people of the African diaspora that continues to inspire. This groundbreaking exhibition brings to light a modern history that has developed over nearly 150 years and is also an active creative tradition existing outside the walls of the Museum and in daily life,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Unprecedented in scope, the exhibition broadly lays out the many ways in which Black artists and cultural figures have engaged and continue to engage with ancient Egypt as a point of reference, inspiration, and connection. Our hope is that it furthers and deepens exploration of this topic.” 

“This is a modern history of how an ancient civilization became a wellspring of inspiration for Black creatives to craft a unifying identity after generations of it being underrepresented and undervalued,” said Ford Foundation President Darren Walker. “This is an exhibition that only The Met can do by pulling inspiration from its own collection stretching back 5,000 years and connecting it to today and our communities in New York City and beyond.”

“The exhibition takes its title from The Met’s painting Flight into Egypt (1923), an emblem of fugitivity and timeless creativity by the expatriate artist Henry Ossawa Tanner—the first internationally recognized African American painter—who traveled to Egypt in 1897, and includes works as recent as Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich’s film Cleopatra at the Mall (2024), which reflects on the rediscovery of Edmonia Lewis’s major sculpture The Death of Cleopatra (1876),” said Akili Tommasino, Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met and the curator of the exhibition. “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now challenges Eurocentric constructions of ancient Egypt, offering a more expansive history that celebrates the contributions of cultural figures of African descent.”

Beginning in the late 19th century, the era of emancipation, Black Americans started to look to ancient Egypt as evidence of an undeniably great ancient African culture to ennoble Black identities, having been systematically stripped of any knowledge of specific African heritage through the transatlantic slave trade, generational enslavement, and dehumanization in American civic life and society. This exhibition will illuminate how modern Black artists and cultural figures asserted affinity with ancient Egypt—in opposition to the prevailing definition of 19th-century Egyptology that distinguished ancient Egypt from “Black Africa” and instead characterized it as proto-European—from the late 19th century to the efflorescence of Afrocentric visual art during the Harlem Renaissance, to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and artistic tendencies of the ensuing decades, to the present day.

While most of the stories in Flight into Egypt are about individuals of African descent born and active in the United States, the work of artists of the Caribbean, Egypt, and other African-born artists active in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere indicate the worldwide resonance of ancient Egypt in the African diaspora—the global dispersion of people of African descent. The exhibition will present both well-known and emerging artists, new works and works new to The Met collection, while also reintroducing rarely displayed works of art and resurfacing obscure objects and documents. 

Artists whose work are on view include: Terry Adkins, Ghada Amer, Ayé Aton, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Thomas Biggers, Barbara Higgins Bond, LaKela Brown, Rashida Bumbray, René Burri, George Washington Carver, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, Irene Clark, Robert Colescott, Houston Conwill, Renee Cox, Shani Crowe, Jamal Cyrus, Damien Davis, Karon Davis, Noah Davis, Charles Clarence Dawson, C. Daniel Dawson, Jeff Donaldson, Aaron Douglas, Emory Douglas, Louis Draper, Dream The Combine (Jennifer Newsom Carruthers and Tom Carruthers), Oasa DuVerney, The Egyptian Lover, Tremaine Emory, Awol Erizku, Fred Eversley, Derek Fordjour, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Genevieve Gaignard, Ellen Gallagher, Sam Gilliam, Chet Gold, Lauren Halsey, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Chester Higgins, EJ Hill, Lonnie Holley, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Gregston Hurdle, Iman Issa, Steffani Jemison, Malvin Gray Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Loïs Mailou Jones, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Armia Malak Khalil, Jas Knight, Solange Knowles, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Maha Maamoun, Eric Mack, Julie Mehretu, Mahmoud Mokhtar, Ronald Moody, John W. Mosley, Lorraine O'Grady, Gordon Parks, Kamau Amu Patton, Robert Pruitt, Richard Pryor, Baaba Heru Ankh Ra Semahj Se Ptah, Sun Ra, Betye Saar, Mahmoud Saïd, Addison N. Scurlock, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, Tavares Strachan, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Henry Taylor, Mildred Thompson, Kara Walker, Laura Wheeler Waring, William T. Williams, and Fred Wilson.

In a first for The Met, performance will be an integral part of the exhibition in the form of a dedicated gallery. Organized in collaboration with MetLiveArts, the Performance Pyramid will both present a documentary history of Black performance art animated by ancient Egyptian themes and serve as the locus for live performances on select days throughout the run of the exhibition. The Performance Pyramid will be activated by Sidra Bell, Rashida Bumbray, Karon Davis, Kahil El'Zabar, Zekkereya El-magharbel, Steffani Jemison, Rashid Johnson, Clifford Owens, Kaneza Schaal, Luke Stewart, Kamau Amu Patton, and M. Lamar and The Living Earth Show, with others to be announced. 

The exhibition catalogue features scholarly essays by Akili Tommasino, Andrea Myers Achi, Makeda Djata Best, and Mia Matthias; artist biographies by Kai Mora; and contributions by artists and musicians: Erykah Badu, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Awol Erizku, Lauren Halsey, Iman Issa, Solange Knowles, Julie Mehretu, Jennifer Newsom, Matthew Shenoda, and Fred Wilson. The catalogue is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and will be available at The Met Store. It will be distributed throughout the world by Yale University Press.

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now is organized by Akili Tommasino, Curator, with McClain Groff, Research Associate, in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met.

The Met Fifth Avenue, New York 

The Tisch Galleries, Gallery 899 Floor 2

www.metmuseum.org

Exhibition Flinders Petrie Shadow Pyramids at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

In the Shadow of the Pyramids: 

Excavating with Flinders Petrie, the Father of Archaeology

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

Through March 25, 2012

  Flinders Petrie at 69, in Abydos 1922
© Petrie Museum,  University College, London

FLINDERS PETRIES: THE FATHER OF ARCHAEOLOGY
The exhibition In the Shadow of the Pyramids tells the story of the English archaeologist and Egyptologist Flinders Petrie’s excavations in Egypt in the years before and after the First World War. Petrie, who lived from 1853 to1942, was the first to illustrate and write down details of his discoveries of everything from pottery and rusty nails to mummies and complete statues. His methods were imitated by other archaeologists and thus Petrie is called the “Father of Archaeology”.

The Egyptologist Tine Bagh with a canopic jar belonging to a man named Iunefer from c. 1800 BC. The jar was found by Flinders Petrie in Hawara in Egypt 1911  Photo © Kim Nilsson

IN THE SHADOW OF THE PYRAMIDS: PIECES IN A JIGSAW PUZZLE
The exhibition “In the Shadow of the Pyramids” displays a number of tomb finds, fragments of statues and tomb and temple walls, which, through Flinders Petrie, came to the Glyptotek. Fresh knowledge and new links with other Petrie finds from, for instance, the British Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, are presented. Visitors have the opportunity to get close to Petrie and his discoveries. One hundred years on, Petrie’s finds have achieved new significance such as when a crown with feathers and horns proves to belong to an impressive statue of the crocodile god Sobek.

Pyramid and ruins of the temple called the Labyrinth in Hawara, Egypt. Photo: Janne Klerk, May 2011. Petrie excavated the Labyrinth in 1911 and found the canopic jar of Iunefer and the relief with at crocodile snout, c. 1800 BC. Photos: Kim Nilsson

  The tomb of Nefermaat and his wife Atet in Meydum, Egypt. Photo: Janne Klerk, May 2011. Flinders Petrie excavated here in 1910 and found the relief with fowling etc. and the wall painting with Nefermaat with a leopard dress in Atet’s chapel, c. 2550 BC. Photos: Ole Haupt.

THE NY CARLSBERG FOUNDATION
Petrie’s excavations were supported by various foundations and museums, particularly in Europe and the USA. For many years the Ny Carlsberg Foundation was one of Petrie’s most generous sponsors. After each excavation campaign Petrie distributed his finds according to clear agreements with the Egyptian state. First the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was allotted the unique finds; thereafter Petrie was permitted to divide up what remained among the various sponsors, according to the extent of their contributions. The Ny Carlsberg Foundation handed over its share of the finds to the Glyptotek. As a result, today, the museum holds over 200 of Petrie’s finest discoveries, some of which come from the ancient sites of Memphis, Meydum and Hawara.

Statuette of Meri-re-ha-ishtef. Excavations of Flinders Petrie 1921 in Sedment, Egypt. AEIN 1560, wood, H 65.5 cm. © Photo Ole Haupt, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

Cosmetic spoon. From the excavations of Flinders Petrie in Sedment, Egypt, 1921. AEIN 1559, wood, L 27 cm. © Photo Ole Haupt, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

The exhibition is supported by Queen Margrethe’s and Prince Henrik’s Foundation, Oticon Foundation and Atlantis Rejser.

NY CARLSBERG GLYPTOTEK

Dantes Plads 7, 1556 Copenhagen

www.glyptoteket.dk