Artist: Wael Shawky

Barakat Contemporary presents Wael Shawky’s (b. 1971, Egypt) second solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition revisits Wael Shawky’s pivotal early video works from the early 2000s: three works from the Telematch series (2007–2009), Al Aqsa Park (2006), and The Cave (Amsterdam) (2005).

In line with Shawky’s ongoing projects that reinterpret established historical narratives to complicate concepts of artistic, religious, and national identity, these works investigate systemic and social dichotomies by reframing them in an often playful and unexpected manner. Furthermore, they put forward a mode of storytelling distinctive to that of more recent works, one that scrutinizes and employs the methodologies of how information is disseminated and received in popular media.

Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1971, Shawky emigrated with his family at an early age to Mecca, Saudi Arabia during the influx of foreign professionals into the country following the oil boom. He has often described this experience as formative to his practice, as he witnessed the coexistence of local traditions—including those of the Bedouin and various other tribes— alongside accelerating urbanization. Additionally, living in Islam’s holiest city, religiosity became a vital element in his artistic exploration. Migration remains a key theme in Shawky’s work, and the selected pieces in this exhibition engage with the transition and convergence of cultures— between nomadism and urbanity, tradition and modernity, and the East and the West. Shawky interrogates the mechanisms that shape societal progress and historical narratives through such intersections.

Spread across both gallery floors are three works from the Telematch series: Telematch Sadat (2007), Suburb (2008), and Shelter (2008). Shawky takes direct inspiration from the eponymous West German television show aired during the 1970s, which was widely exported and popular in Saudi Arabia during Shawky’s childhood. In the TV series, two German towns compete in timed games in which the players wear outrageous costumes making their movements awkward and comical. The Telematch series adopts the show’s format in which disparate cultures clash and exchange for entertainment.

Telematch Sadat reenacts Egyptian president Anwar Sadat's (1918-1981) 1981 assassination and funeral, an event that remains deeply embedded in Egyptian collective memory. The event was recorded by state television, as it took place during a military parade celebrating the Egyptian victory at the onset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, or the Fourth Arab-Israeli War. It then eventually led to another dictatorship under Hosni Mubarak (1928-2020) that lasted 30 years. Shawky instructed a group of Bedouin children—who have no knowledge of Sadat or his assassination—to perform the event, replacing military parade vehicles with donkeys and camel caravans. Shawky often works with children, as he does with marionettes and masks in later works, to avoid any interpretation via the actors’ performance or their social and gender roles. In this way, the event is revisited from a detached yet striking lens.

In Telematch Suburb, Shawky invited a heavy metal band to perform in a rural village in the Egyptian Delta. The villagers had never experienced anything of the kind and the artist did not reveal the film’s intention to any of the participants. Not surprisingly, the concert is met with confused and unenthusiastic reactions. Telematch Shelter presents a simple loop of children continuously entering and exiting a mud hut in Egypt’s Western Desert, signifying a perpetual transition between nomadism and settlement. In both works “modernity” is set against the so- called “primitive” or “traditional,” which oftentimes are the exoticized performers for the former. The power dynamics reversed and the displacement perpetuated, Shawky ravels the unilateral direction of development and progress.

The Cave (Amsterdam) (2005) is one of three iterations of The Cave, alongside versions filmed in Istanbul (2004) and Hamburg (2006). In this work, Shawky walks down the aisles of a supermarket in Amsterdam, reciting from memory “Surah al-Khaf” (“The Cave”) from the Qur’an. The story also exists in Christianity in a slight variation. In the verse, a group of young devout men find refuge in a cave to escape persecution by nonbelieving villagers. To protect them, God puts them to sleep for 309 years. When they are woken up, they propagate God’s miraculous power themselves as proof to the new generation. Islamic scholars often link this narrative to the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina in pursuit of knowledge and power. Similarly, Shawky’s serial performance in Istanbul and Hamburg points to his own migration as an artist. Starkly contrasted with the epitome of the capitalist display, the unsettling foreignness of his performance speaks for the impact or even incongruity of globalization on religion and local cultures. On the one hand, the artist’s position, reminiscent of a news reporter, remains ambiguous–he maintains a certain neutrality to expose the fissure between irreconcilable systems rather than simply critiquing the dominance of consumerism.

Al Aqsa Park (2006) is a computer animation that depicts the Dome of the Rock in continuous rotation, gliding up and down. Built between 689 and 691 AD in Jerusalem, the Dome is historically and still a highly contested site between Palestine and Israel, as it is one of the most sacred locations in both Muslim and Judeo-Christian traditions. Shawky renders it weightless, adorned with marquee lights, transforming it into a carnival attraction or even a UFO. The Dome endlessly pendulates like the unresolvable polarities, whereas the funfair spectacle suggests that it has also become the very performative apparatus of political and ideological forces.

Wael Shawky’s works in this exhibition bring together seemingly incompatible worlds by displacing them from their original context and placing them side by side to reveal their complex sociopolitical layers. They borrow the language of mass media, a source of supposed authoritative information and entertainment, to situate nonfictional events and communities between definitive moments in history. And it is often this continual migration of peoples and ideas that propels the most well-known stories, behind what has already been settled and denominated.

On the other hand, compared to his more recent works such as The Cabaret Crusades (2010- 2015) and Drama 1882 (2024) in which Shawky further elaborates on historical narratives, these early videos stay acute to the nature of their subjects. Deeming each local society and custom autonomous, the artist does not alter their character but simply builds a stage to let it unwind itself in the process of negotiation and collision. Due to its course, Shawky distances himself from direct critique; his role is as a translator and interpreter of history as he often describes. Whether it be working with children or an abrupt clash of uninformed guests, he brings in a detached, neutral device that functions as a kind of hinge, enabling rigid systems to bend and come into contact.

And to revisit the works now, they gain more relevance like the awakened Sleepers. In an era of increasing sociopolitical polarization, where each side is blinded by its ideals, we find that the concept of human advancement is not unidirectional. It is more like the merry-go-round, and it is still rotating.