Wael Shawky Aims to Kill Drama in His Art 

In one of the eeriest works at Jeddah’s inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in 2023, a trio of giant streetlights tilted slowly from side to side, soundtracked by the otherworldly hum of locusts. This kinetic sculpture was In the Sound of Muzdalifah (2023) by Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, known for his richly textured filmic trilogies that challenge the hagiographic construction of history. The work recalls the artist’s vivid childhood experience of Hajj – the holy pilgrimage to Makkah – in which the faithful perform combined sunset and evening prayers before sleeping under the stars just outside Islam’s holiest city. While intended to speak to the sense of wonder and spiritual calm the artist experienced during his pilgrimage, shown in Saudi Arabia amidst its most recent social reform, the work felt more like a portent.

Although Shawky didn’t know it at the time, Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s was a country about to undergo a sea change. In December 1979, several hundred anti-monarchist militants laid siege to the Great Mosque of Makkah, the holiest site in Islam. They held worshippers hostage and fought a bloody battle that lasted two weeks, ending only with help from elite tactical French military units. In response, Saudi Arabia adopted a much stricter set of religious laws, radically empowered the clergy and established the religious police, ushering in nearly four decades of austere conservatism. It was a watershed moment for a young Shawky, who was born in Alexandria but spent his preteen years in Makkah and experienced this transformation first hand. It sparked an interest in frictive clashes between disparate systems that would become central to his practice.

‘It was a very crazy time,’ he tells me. ‘Makkah, I think, is the most cosmopolitan city ever,’ he adds, pointing to the multicultural legacy of its long history of pilgrimage. Residents with origins in Africa, South and Southeast Asia and the wider Middle East, many of them undocumented, lived cheek by jowl with the tough, deeply tribal culture of its natives, all coupled with the advent of American yeehaw. ‘It’s a contradiction between systems you cannot even compare. You’d see this Bedouin man, barefoot, driving a Cadillac, while his son is riding a donkey; it’s all mixed. And a big part of this, of course, affected my language and my art.’

Equally influential were American wrestling shows and the 1970s German gameshow Telematch, which showcased contestants in quasi-medieval, movement-restricting costumes, battling it out with adversaries from other cities. Both were extremely popular in Saudi Arabia and Egypt at the time. ‘Already they knew about the American Dream; we knew about the WWF’s Ric Flair. These different layers of systems, you’d see this in front of you all the time.’ Telematch, in particular, inspired the series ‘Telematch’ (2007–ongoing), a collection of short films shot around Egypt. In Telematch Sadat (2007) a gang of kids re-enacts the mid-parade assassination and funeral of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, while in Telematch Suburb (2008), a heavy metal band plays to a thinning crowd of puzzled rural farmers.

I don’t like acting; I like to kill drama in my work. Wael Shawky

Shawky had previously experimented with both animation and casting amateur actors, and had featured in some of his own films reciting Qur’anic suwar (verses) in an Amsterdam supermarket (The Cave, 2005) or a former Swiss monastery (A Digital Translation of a Biblical Story, 2007). In the ‘Telematch’ series, he began to work with children, a group unburdened by either historical memory or dramatic convention. ‘I don’t like acting; I like to kill drama in my work,’ he explains. ‘So, when you work with kids, that achieves this idea because they don’t really know what we’re talking about. They don’t know the history of Sadat. They don’t have any preconceived idea of what this character should be like. So, when I tell them to jump from this car to this car and run and kill, they just follow.’

Telematch Crusades (2009), also enacted by children, introduces the religious wars that would become the subject of his epic series ‘Cabaret Crusades’ (2010–15). Drawing from Lebanese historian Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1983), the trilogy spans several centuries of bloody atrocities, pestilence, political machinations and generalized villainy. A side quest on the beginnings of the Sunni-Shia schism is especially effective in unspooling the construction of Arab identity. This is no inverted hagiography: Arabs are not presented as victims here so much as active agents of their own history. The horrors and the humanity are all the more keenly felt in Shawky’s use of marionettes, who ‘also don’t act. When you look at a figure like [12th-century Seljuk ruler] Nur al-Din Zengi, it’s very difficult to say for certain, “Oh, he was a bad man,” or “He had good intentions.”’

When the trilogy is shown, the films are screened alongside a display of these marionettes (and often drawings, too), extending Shawky’s world building into the exhibition space. They are as bizarre as they are gorgeous, with their materiality adding another narrative layer to the work. For The Horror Show File (2010), the artist used 200-year-old wooden marionettes to enhance the film’s visual language. In The Path to Cairo (2012), he turned to ceramics ‘because of the religious idea of how we were created from mud’. In reference to the fact that the crusades were launched from the French town of Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne, Shawky worked with Provençal artisans from Aubagne, who have a long history of making hand-painted terracotta santons (nativity figurines). And in The Secrets of Karbala (2015), the marionettes are fashioned from precariously fragile Murano glass, because of the film’s focus on Venetian involvement in the Fourth Crusade.

It was in this last work, his third ‘Cabaret Crusades’ film, that Shawky began experimenting with inverting the image. He reprised the technique in the last of the Al Araba Al Madfuna (2012–16) trilogy, in which kids solemnly voice parables from the writings of Egyptian novelist Mohamed Mostagab, coupled with scenes from the artist’s own experiences of Upper Egypt. Here, too, the artist continues his own personal crusade against acting: ‘To enhance the idea of killing drama, I inverted the colour and inverted the light. With these types of images, you don’t see even the innocence of the children anymore.’

It consequently came as a surprise to no one more than Shawky when, for his standout Egyptian pavilion presentation at last year’s Venice Biennale, he wholeheartedly embraced the idea of drama. He explains that, rather than considering history as linear, in Drama 1882 (2024), which had its US premiere at the MOCA Geffen this February, he felt he needed to explore the idea of a staged history that focuses on a single point. As such, he zoomed in on Egypt’s anti-imperial Urabi Revolution, which the British crushed in 1882, before going on to occupy the country until 1956, well after its independence in 1922. ‘I believe this is what I’m really trying to do since Cabaret Crusades,’ he says, of his attempts to present a morally neutral narrative through marionettes. ‘All the characters are presenting society, but not individuality, even if you see a name on top of them.’ In particular, he speaks admiringly of German artist Gerhard Richter’s ability to exert extreme control over his medium: ‘Even if you know his work is made by human hand, you cannot trace the physical connection. I try to do the same: to completely erase human expression from my films, but also to make and control it.’

Put another way: it is societies – their entire worldviews – and not human individuals who are the main characters here. Shawky achieves this through another inversion: working with professional performers for the first time to create a situation wherein dancers ‘become more hypnotized, as if they are learning from the marionettes. So, you don’t see reactions on their faces, just very slow movement from their bodies. That’s why I called it drama.’ The artist deploys a similar strategy in his latest work, Love Story (2024), which adapts Korean folk and fairy tales through an interpretation of traditional pansori – a form of storytelling that combines opera singing and movement. Another recent film, I Am Hymns of the New Temples (2023), takes an intermediary approach, with performers wearing masks that hide their expressions, drawing the eye to their bodily movements. The artist tells me that he is approaching future films with this same ethos: a style of ‘mixing’ that carries echoes of the cultural fusion of Makkah.

It is societies – their entire worldviews – and not human individuals who are the main characters here. Rahel Aima

Prior to Love Story, Shawky had already used Urdu qawwali (Sufi devotionals) as well as regional forms like the Gulf ’s fijiri (pearl diver songs) in his work. Mostly, he transposes his sources to the classical Arabic of the Qur’an, composing all music in addition to writing, directing and choreographing. Yet, even as he sees himself as a translator striving to bridge different cultural forms, he is adamant that history itself, in its very contingency, is a form of human creation. He points to his generation’s lived experience of the Egyptian revolution where, despite substantial documentation by media and footage filmed on individuals’ phones, the government is working hard to retroactively rewrite the narrative. Suspicious of these developments, he has avoided showing in his native country since 2010, despite being based in Alexandria, and agreed to do the Egyptian pavilion at the Venice Biennale only if he was granted absolute control. The government obliged, handing over the keys along with funding responsibilities – and even eschewing the opening – with the only condition being that he show the work in Egypt after the biennial closed.

‘Sometimes, I think I’m fascinated with the idea of translating societies that are moving from one system to another. Sometimes, it’s just a dream. A dream of transforming from Bedouin nomadism into an agricultural society, for instance, or into urbanism – that exists a lot in Egypt,’ he says, adding that he is particularly fascinated by religiously motivated transfigurations. He describes the crusades as another such dream that posited a similarly linear evolution to a higher level, one seductive enough to encourage people to walk several thousand gruelling miles on foot. ‘It’s this religious idea that you are transforming. Even if you die, you’re going to the higher place. This, for me, is like the Christian jihad. With all of this motivation, they moved from one place to another.’

I’m fascinated with the idea of translating societies that are moving from one system to another. Wael Shawky

Shawky is careful to caution that this dream often distorts into unimaginable absurdity, deftly captured in the gentle strangeness of his whimsical, animal-filled drawings that present a softer, more fantastical depiction of the events of his films; history as a bestiary, seen through pastel-coloured glasses. Often, the result is something far uglier, gesturing to both the decimation of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, and the current regime’s efforts to terraform contemporary Egyptian society. He believes that, despite occurring a millennium ago, the events of the crusades continue to cast their shadow today. ‘Although this is not the biggest massacre that happened in the Middle East, it gives an idea about the relationship between West and East. The memory of the crusades still exists today in the subconscious of the Eastern person, or the Muslim person in particular. This is what you see today in Gaza, for instance, and nobody is able to stop these crimes.’

After a number of projects focusing on European history – including his Arabic interpretation of the continent’s Ancient Greek foundational myth, Isles of the Blessed (Oops!... I forgot Europe) (2022) – Shawky is returning to the Gulf for his next work. Beginning with the 17th century migration from the Saudi mainland to what are now coastal city states, the as-yet-untitled film looks at the recent history of the Arabian Peninsula, which he is particularly drawn to because ‘it’s a history existing, but not transformed yet. The narrative here has not been processed yet in movies or anything; it’s interesting to try to play with it as a human creation.’ Recently named the first artistic director of Doha’s Fire Station, the artist will relocate his arts education centre, MASS Alexandria, to the premises for the duration of his tenure.

And if Shawky could himself travel back in time, where and when would he go? El Balyana in Upper Egypt, it turns out, where he made his Al Araba Al Madfuna trilogy, and where there is a mysterious, water-filled underground temple, Osireion. ‘There are many, many sayings from different scholars about this place, but nobody knows what it is, and nobody knows why it’s there and why it’s located behind Seti I’s temple,’ he enthuses, noting that some academics believe the pyramids predate the Pharaohs and have striking architectural similarities to their Mesoamerican counterparts. ‘If I could go back to the time of Seti I in Egyptian history, it would be fantastic to understand Osireion’.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 249 with the headline ‘Wael Shawky’

'2024 Overseas Exchange Exhibition: Wael Shawky' is on view at Daegu Art Museum, South Korea until 23 February and Wael Shawky will be on view at Talbot Rice Gallery, Scotland, from 28 June – 28 September

^{Main image: Wael Shawky, I am Hymns of the New Temples (detail), 2023, film still. Courtesy: © Wael Shawky, Lisson Gallery, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Lia Rumma, and Barakat Contemporary}