Now Showing: Youssef Nabil's I Saved My Belly Dancer LACMA, Los Angeles - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer 

LACMA, Los Angeles

Through January 11, 2026

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #XXIV, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #II, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #XXV, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer, the first public presentation of the film since it entered the museum’s collection in 2025. The exhibition is centered around Nabil’s film, I Saved My Belly Dancer (2015), which marks its 10th anniversary this year. Tahar Rahim, who resembles Nabil, embodies the artist’s alter ego, while Salma Hayek stars as the titular belly dancer. For Youssef Nabil, the dancer represents both a remembered and an imagined memory of Cairo. He states, “I wanted to talk about belly dancing as an art form that is probably unique to us [Egypt]. It’s our dance. I’ve always loved it. So, I wanted to talk about saving the idea of belly dancing in my memory, more than anything.” 

The installation of Now Showing intends to evoke the type of mid-20th-century movie theater, including retro seats, contemporaneous with the Egyptian films that inspired the works in the exhibition. The space contains a photographic portrait of the director, hand-colored by Nabil’s mentor, Van Leo, and vintage movie posters. Additionally, the exhibition features photographs, based on the film, created by Nabil’s signature practice of hand-painting on silver gelatin prints rendered dreamlike by the unearthly intensity and tonality of the color palette. This is a revival of a mid-20th century technique associated with such Cairo-based photographers as Van Leo (Levon Alexander Boyadjian (1921–2002)).

This presentation continues LACMA’s history of exploring how film and popular culture interrelate with traditional areas of art from all periods and cultures. Over the past 30 years, the museum has acquired time-based media objects in nearly every curatorial department, including Nam June Paik’s Video Flag Z (1986), Matthew Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) (1991), Bill Viola’s Slowly Turning Narrative (1992), and Mariko Mori’s Miko no Inori (1996), as well as works by Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Marclay, Steve McQueen, Bruce Nauman, and Diana Thater.

Artist Youssef Nabil

Born in Cairo in 1972, Youssef Nabil began his career as a photographer in 1992, shooting his friends and creating scripts for them to perform, inspired by films from Egypt, Europe, and Hollywood. He developed a distinctive style by hand-painting gelatin silver prints reminiscent of glamorous celebrity portraits from the 1940s and ’50s, a technique he mastered through his friendship with renowned studio photographer Van Leo (Levon Alexander Boyadjian (1921–2002)). In 2003, Youssef Nabil left Cairo for an art residency in Paris, where he began taking self-portraits, addressing more personal issues of identity and displacement. Nabil continued his artistic practice in New York, where he lived from 2006 to 2018. His artistic practice addresses universal themes of absence, nostalgia, and cultural identity, while maintaining strong connections to his Egyptian heritage. Youssef Nabil has continued to draw inspiration from cinema, making portraits of contemporary film stars and artists, such as Catherine Deneuve, Omar Sharif, and Marina Abramovic. He also makes video works, collaborating frequently with actor Tahar Rahim. Currently, he is working on his first feature film, which will be multilingual and partially filmed in Egypt. Today Youssef Nabil resides between Paris and New York.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is curated by Linda Komaroff, Curator and Department Head, Art of the Middle East, LACMA.

LACMA - LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART 

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036 

lacma.org

Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer 

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

August 24, 2025 – January 11, 2026

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

Artist Fathi Hassan @ Richard Saltoun Gallery, London - "I can see you smiling Fatma" Exhibition

Fathi Hassan 

I can see you smiling Fatma

Richard Saltoun Gallery, London 

9 April - 25 May 2024

FATHI HASSAN

Santa Samara, 2021

© Fathi Hassan / Courtesy Richard Saltoun

FATHI HASSAN

Different horizons..one sky, 2022

Mixed media on paper, 150 x 100 cm

© Fathi Hassan / Courtesy Richard Saltoun

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents a solo exhibition with Edinburgh-based, Egyptian born artist, FATHI HASSAN (b. 1957, Egypt), marking the gallery's representation of the artist. Showcasing a new body of paintings and a site-specific mural, this is Fathi Hassan's first exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery, and follows from his participation in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial. 

Entitled I can see you smiling Fatma, the exhibition, dedicated to his mother, showcases recent work that fuses his distinctive calligraphic motifs with the rich visual iconography drawn from his Nubian heritage. The exhibition will be followed by a further solo exhibition at No.9 Cork Street, London, entitled Fathi Hassan: Shifting Sands. Presented by The Sunderland Collection, this will be on view between May 31 - June 15, 2024. The two exhibitions jointly highlight the artist’s engagement with the experience of migration, dislocation, diasporic identity, and shifting notions of heritage.

Born in Cairo in 1957 to Nubian and Egyptian parents, Fathi Hassan’s family were forced to leave their homeland of Nubia when the Aswan High Dam was built in 1952, flooding a vast area now under Lake Nasser. In his early twenties, he received a grant to study at Naples Art School, taking him to Italy where he developed his practice and gained artistic prominence. International recognition for his work grew in the 1980s and Hassan became one of the first African and Arab artists to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1988 curated by Dan Cameron.

Since then, Fathi Hassan has exhibited internationally, particularly in the Middle East, Italy and more recently the UK, where he relocated in 2018. His personal history, marked by constant movement and displacement has been a key influence on his artistic practice and the exhibition concept. 

The works in the exhibition continue Fathi Hassan’s excavation of his Nubian heritage. Incorporating images, colours and materials evoking cultural relics, cartographic fragments, and the essence of the landscape, these evocative compositions are layered with enigmatic inscriptions of ancient languages erased by colonialism. Though rooted in Kufic calligraphy, these scripts remain purposefully indecipherable, challenging the socio-cultural constructs of language and suggesting alternative ways of interpreting the relationship between text and image, the signifier and the signified. In the same calligraphic style, the artist will create a large-scale, site-specific mural spanning an entire wall in the rear gallery, echoing previous museum commissions.

His portraits of Nubian Warriors are depicted against ornamental backgrounds populated by patterns, animals and people in a highly narrative, almost hieroglyphic style. Many of Fathi Hassan’s works bear imprints of his profound personal journey, paying homage to figures from revered philosophers to cherished family members, notably his mother, Fatma, to whom the exhibition is dedicated Thus, Hassan's exhibition serves as a poignant meditation on displacement, diasporic identity, and the multifaceted layers of language, distilled through the prism of his personal autobiography. 

These themes will be further expanded through the exhibition Fathi Hassan: Shifting Sands at No.9 Cork Street, unveiling a new body of work created in response to items from The Sunderland Collection – an extraordinary private collection of rare antique world and celestial maps. For this show, the artist uses maps as a lens, incorporating motifs and images that have recurred throughout his practice, and drawing in new influences such as thinkers and creatives who have had a global influence on science or culture across borders. 

FATHI HASSAN

Fathi Hassan (b. 1957) was born in Cairo to Nubian and Egyptian parents. He is known for his calligraphic works spanning photography, paintings, installation and drawing that highlight the plight of lost languages and oral history as a result of colonial domination. He rose to international prominence in the 1980s, and was among the first African and Arab artists to be included in the Venice Biennale in 1988. Having worked between Italy and Great Britain for many years, he finally took up residence in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2018.

Notable solo exhibitions include; Whispers, Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai (2019); Migration of Signs, Williams Museum, Massachusetts (2015); The Depth of Hope, V.C.U. Qatar, Doha (2014); Faces and Voices, John Rylands Library, Manchester UK (2012); Fathi Hassan: Transformation, Skoto Gallery, New York (2011); National Museum Villa Pisani, Stra, Venice (2008) and Containers of Memory, Annina Nosei Gallery, New York (1995).

RICHARD SALTOUN GALLERY LONDON

41 Dover Street, W1S 4NS London UK

www.richardsaltoun.com