Mawruth | A Living Inheritance

From Alexandria to a Fragment of the Dragon Carpet

What does it mean to inherit a culture?

Is inheritance something we receive from the past and preserve unchanged, or is it something that remains alive precisely because every generation transforms it?

This question was at the heart of Mawruth | A Living Inheritance, a curatorial project introduced and initiated by Shelter Art Space in Alexandria, where I had the privilege of serving as assignment curator.

From its inception, Mawruth was conceived not as an exhibition about folklore in the traditional sense, but as an exploration of mوروث—cultural inheritance—as a living and evolving process. Shelter Art Space initiated the project as part of a broader interest in bringing Egyptian popular culture into dialogue with contemporary artistic practice, particularly through the visual traditions of Upper Egypt.

Folklore is often understood as a repository of the past: stories, rituals, customs, celebrations, images, music, crafts and practices handed down from one generation to another. Yet Egyptian folklore has never been a fixed archive. It moves through everyday life. It changes as it is spoken, performed, remembered and reinterpreted.

This was the starting point for Mawruth.

Nine artists, nine ways of remembering

The exhibition brought together artists from different generations and artistic backgrounds, united not by a single visual language, but by their engagement with Egyptian popular culture and the ways in which it continues to shape memory and identity.

Hassan El Sharq, whose work has long been deeply connected to Egyptian folklore, offered perhaps one of the most direct examples of this relationship. His visual world transforms the details of everyday popular life into a rich language of symbols, figures and narratives. His work reminds us that folklore does not necessarily reside in grand historical events; it can be found in ordinary people, familiar gestures and the visual vocabulary of everyday life.

With Omar Abdel Zaher, this relationship becomes particularly visible in his depictions of life in southern Egypt. His paintings draw on local popular culture and folklore, often presenting family and community scenes and giving dignity and presence to ordinary people. His earlier work, for example, has focused on street vendors and everyday activities, transforming seemingly ordinary scenes into intimate records of Egyptian social life.

Abdelfattah Elbadry approaches the heritage of Upper Egypt through movement, gathering and celebration. His practice spans painting, printmaking and related graphic techniques, while his visual language is strongly informed by the environment of Aswan and southern Egypt. In works depicting tahtib, wedding processions and other popular rituals, bodies and gestures become central to the composition. His use of vibrant colour, precise line and a bird’s-eye perspective allows the collective character of these events to become almost architectural.

Saad Zaghloul brings another dimension to the exhibition: the documentation of ritual through painting. His work in Mawruth focuses on the traditional scene of Zaffet El-Tohour—the circumcision procession—placing a social ritual within the visual language of contemporary painting. His wider engagement with Upper Egyptian cultural traditions also extends beyond painting into the preservation of tallyembroidery, an important craft tradition associated with Assiut.

In Hayam Abdel Baky’s work, folklore becomes something closer to a visual storybook. Her paintings are populated by women, children, animals, houses, plants and fragments of rural life, often densely layered across the picture surface. Her visual language draws deeply from her childhood in the Egyptian countryside, from oral stories and memories of village life, and from the rhythms of popular culture. In Muroth, her representation of the bride, the howdah and the wedding procession brings one of the most recognizable rituals of Egyptian social life into a contemporary visual narrative.

Maha George Mikhail, an artist and professor of painting, approaches cultural inheritance through a different visual vocabulary. Her works in the exhibition take the form of hanging pieces that draw on Coptic iconographic traditions while incorporating Egyptian symbols and contemporary visual associations. Her practice demonstrates how religious and historical visual languages can be reactivated rather than simply reproduced. Her long artistic career and engagement with Coptic art, painting and contemporary Egyptian culture provide another layer to the exhibition’s understanding of inheritance.

Samaa Yhia brings the figure of the doll and the arousa—the traditional Egyptian doll—into the conversation. Her practice has explored popular dolls through sculpture and mixed visual forms, including works inspired by traditional Egyptian khayamiya textiles. The doll becomes more than an object: it becomes a carrier of memory, femininity, childhood and ritual. Her approach demonstrates how an apparently simple popular object can contain layers of cultural history stretching from ancient Egypt to the moulid doll and the domestic world of the Egyptian home.

Mina Isaac and Mahmoud Salem contributed further contemporary readings of popular culture, extending the exhibition’s visual vocabulary beyond a single definition of folklore. Their inclusion was important to the curatorial structure because Mawruth was never intended to produce one unified aesthetic. Instead, the exhibition allowed different artistic voices to encounter the same cultural field from different positions and generations. Their works participated in this larger movement between recognition and reinterpretation, between inherited imagery and contemporary artistic language.

Together, these artists demonstrated that there is no single visual form of mوروث. It can appear as a procession, a family scene, a dance, a bride, a doll, a village, a religious symbol, a popular craft or a fragment of everyday life.

It can also appear in the way an artist chooses to look.

Folklore as a living social practice

The intellectual foundation of the project was informed by the work of Abdel Hamid Younes, whose scholarship contributed significantly to the modern study of Arab popular culture and approached folklore as something embedded in social life rather than confined to a historical archive.

I was also influenced by the writings of Mohamed Mahmoud El Gohary, whose anthropological and sociological approach to folklore examined the relationships between collective memory, belief, identity and the structures through which societies understand themselves.

From this perspective, folklore is not outside society.

It is one of the ways society remembers itself, imagines itself and sees itself.

This understanding became particularly important when working with the artists. They were not simply illustrating traditions. They were revealing how those traditions continue to operate within contemporary consciousness.

A ritual becomes an image. A memory becomes material.

A familiar symbol becomes something unfamiliar. An inherited form is broken apart and reconstructed.

In this sense, the artists do not merely represent mوروث. They participate in its continuation.

Alexandria as a space of memory

The decision to initiate Mawruth at Shelter Art Space in Alexandria was significant.

Alexandria is a city shaped by layers of memory and cultural exchange. Its history has been formed through encounters between different peoples, traditions and ways of seeing. It is therefore an especially meaningful place to consider how culture is inherited, transformed and continually rewritten.

Shelter Art Space added another dimension to this idea. The space occupies a historic building constructed in 1928 as a World War II shelter and transformed decades later into an art space. The building itself therefore embodies a process of transformation: a place created in response to a moment of crisis becoming a place for contemporary artistic dialogue.

The exhibition was consequently not simply placed inside a historical space.

It entered into conversation with a space whose own history had already been transformed.

Beyond the exhibition

Mawruth | A Living Inheritance was initiated by Shelter Art Space as part of a larger commitment to bringing renewed attention to Egyptian cultural memory and its relationship with contemporary art. The exhibition is intended as a beginning rather than a conclusion—a first chapter in a wider exploration of artistic practices inspired by popular culture, particularly the visual heritage of Upper Egypt.

This is also why the encounter with CulturalxCollabs feels so relevant to me.

The fragment of the Dragon Carpet travelling through different hands and cultures speaks to the same principle that shaped Mawruth: cultural inheritance is not weakened when it moves.

It gains another life.

Ultimately, the question is not simply what do we inherit?

It is: What happens to what we inherit when it passes through us?

Every generation is both a receiver and a temporary custodian.

We receive stories, images, rituals, objects and memories. We alter them—sometimes consciously and sometimes without realizing it—and then pass them forward.

What remains is not necessarily the original form.

What remains is the possibility of continuation.

From an exhibition initiated in Alexandria and rooted in Egyptian popular culture, to a fragment of a historic carpet travelling across borders and cultures, the same idea continues to emerge:

Inheritance lives not because we keep it unchanged, but because we allow it to live again.

Perhaps that is what Mawruth ultimately means.

Not something we simply preserve.

Not something that belongs only to the past.

But something that passes through us, changes through us, and continues because of that change.

A living inheritance.

Sahar Behairy

Curator, Mawruth | A Living Inheritance

Shelter Art Space, Alexandria

My grandfather painted cinema posters in 1960s Alexandria. Giant hand-painted faces for films that played in theatres that no longer exist. When he died, I inherited his studio — his brushes, his pigments, the smell of turpentine soaked into the walls.

I once said: we have the same brush.

I meant it literally. But also not literally at all. What I meant was: the work continues. The hand changes but the impulse doesn’t. Something moves through families, through cities, through objects — if you let it. That’s what I think about when I hold this carpet fragment.

Fragment #78 arrived in Alexandria like most important things arrive here — from somewhere else, carrying a history that doesn’t belong to one place. A 17th-century Caucasian dragon carpet, woven again in Rajasthan, cut in Berlin, now sitting in a studio that used to make movie posters for Egyptian cinema.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s just how culture actually works.

Alexandria has always known this. This city was built on exchange — Greek, Ottoman, French, Italian, Egyptian, all layered on top of each other like paint on a wall. I grew up surrounded by that layering. It’s in the architecture, in the language, in the way people here mix references without thinking about it. My grandfather’s cinema posters were the same — Egyptian stories painted with techniques borrowed from everywhere.

I started painting walls in Alexandria when I was 18. Not because I had a theory about public art. Because the academy was narrow and the street was wide. I wanted my work to exist where people actually lived — not behind a ticket counter.

That was 2008. Since then the work has travelled — Beirut, Stuttgart, Vienna, Milan, Paris, Sharjah. Every wall in a different city is a negotiation: your visual language meeting a place that has its own. You don’t impose. You listen. Then you paint.

A carpet fragment does the same thing. It arrives somewhere and the meaning shifts depending on who’s holding it.

The pattern stays. The story changes.

Last week, Fragment #78 sat on a table next to a stack of signed risograph posters and plates of kebda eskandrani on sourdough toast.

I’d organised a lunch at The Alexandria Deli — a small event where people came to eat, look at art, and talk. The posters were from TOKEN, my solo exhibition at Kodak Passageway in Cairo. Alexandrian liver, dijon mustard, signed prints. No velvet ropes. No press wall. Just the kind of afternoon my grandfather would have recognised: people, food, art, all in the same room with no separation between them.

That’s what Azarita is becoming. Named after the neighbourhood in Alexandria where the studio still stands, it’s my way of turning the practice into infrastructure. Not just painting walls, but curating experiences, building surfaces, creating systems that let the work travel further and last differently. A lunch with kebda and posters is as much a part of it as a mural commission in the Gulf. The point is that the work meets people where they are — whether that’s a wall in Vienna or a deli table in Kafr Abdo.

My grandfather’s posters were commercial objects. They were also art. That was never a contradiction in his studio, and it isn’t one in mine.