Artist · Egypt
Anna Boghiguian
Anna Boghiguian (born 1946) is an Egyptian artist of Armenian descent, born in Cairo. Living a near-nomadic life between Cairo, India and Europe, she makes expressive drawings, paintings, artist's books and large installations about cities, history, trade and the people caught up in them. She has shown at Documenta 13, the Istanbul Biennial and the Venice Biennale, and her work is in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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Anna Boghiguian was born in Cairo in 1946 to an Armenian-Egyptian family. She graduated in 1969 from the American University in Cairo, in economics and political science, then took a BFA in visual arts and music at Concordia University in Montreal. Since then she has lived on the move, between Cairo, India, Canada and Europe, drawing and painting wherever she goes; travel itself became her method.
Her work begins with drawing: quick, expressive figures and city views in pen, watercolour and gouache, often with words written across them, collected in notebooks and artist's books. In recent years these drawings have grown into large installations that combine paintings, cut-out figures, maps, sails, salt and beeswax. They deal with big subjects — the history of cities such as Cairo and Istanbul, colonialism, the trade in cotton and salt, war and migration — through the lives of ordinary people.
She showed at Documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012, and took part in the 14th Istanbul Biennial in 2015. In 2015 she was also among the artists of the Armenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which won the Golden Lion for best national participation. Solo exhibitions followed at the Castello di Rivoli (19 September 2017 to 7 January 2018), the New Museum in New York (2018) and Tate St Ives (2019). A 2024 report says she was to receive the thirtieth Wolfgang Hahn Prize.
How to look at a Boghiguian installation: walk through it as you would through a city, reading the figures and the writing as you pass, because the work is built from fragments that add up slowly. The materials — salt, sails, beeswax — are themselves part of the history she is telling. That reading is this site's own.
Where to see the work
The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Castello di Rivoli are listed among the collections that hold her work, and the Sfeir-Semler gallery in Hamburg and Beirut represents her. Ask each what is on view. See Wael Shawky, Ghada Amer and our lists of Egyptian painters and Egyptian artists.
