Artist and filmmaker · Egypt
Wael Shawky
Wael Shawky (born 1971) is an Egyptian artist from Alexandria who works with film, performance, drawing and sculpture. He is best known for Cabaret Crusades (2010–2015), a trilogy of films that retells the Crusades from an Arab viewpoint using marionettes, and for Drama 1882, a musical film about the Urabi revolt made for the Egyptian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. He founded the art school MASS Alexandria.
Updated 2 min read
Wael Shawky was born in Alexandria in 1971. He studied fine art at Alexandria University and then in the United States, at the University of Pennsylvania. History, religion and the way stories are told — and by whom — run through his work.
His best-known project, Cabaret Crusades (2010–2015), is a trilogy of films — The Horror Show Files (2010), The Path to Cairo (2012) and The Secrets of Karbala (2015) — that tells the history of the Crusades from the Arab side, drawing on medieval Arab chroniclers such as Usama ibn Munqidh, Ibn al-Qalanisi and Ibn al-Athir, and on Amin Maalouf's book The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. All the characters are marionettes: for the first film he used two-hundred-year-old puppets from a museum in Turin, and for the later ones he had figures made in ceramic and in Murano glass. The dialogue is sung and spoken in classical Arabic. In other works, such as Al Araba Al Madfuna, children speak adult voices, and real people move like puppets.
For the Egyptian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale he made Drama 1882, a film-opera about the Urabi revolt against foreign control and the riots in Alexandria that preceded the British bombardment of the city, with music and libretto written by Shawky himself. He also founded MASS Alexandria, an independent study programme for young artists. The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf presented the complete trilogy together for the first time in Europe, and the Castello di Rivoli gave him a solo show with a catalogue of related archive material.
How to look at Cabaret Crusades: watch the puppets before you read the subtitles. The figures are stiff and strange, which keeps the epic at a distance, and the sung classical Arabic turns chronicle into ritual; notice who has been given the voice. That reading is this site's own.
Where to see the work
The National Gallery of Canada holds Cabaret Crusades III: The Secrets of Karbala; the Edinburgh College of Art's Talbot Rice Gallery and Art21 have published on his films. Ask the museums and the galleries that represent him what is currently on view. See Ghada Amer, Anna Boghiguian and our list of Egyptian artists.
