EDINBURGH.- Talbot Rice Gallery opened a solo exhibition of Egyptian artist Wael Shawky across its contemporary and neoclassical galleries.

Wael Shawky’s penetrating film installations explore histories that have shaped our world. Intricately created sets and painted environments become host to exquisitely crafted and costumed characters, who perform versions of history connected to conflicts that continue to rage around us. Across Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades series and the recent Drama 1882 (created for the Egyptian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024), Shawky reopens the narrative of the series of religious wars known as the Crusades, from an Arab perspective. He also highlights the events leading up to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, destabilising any singular authority by embracing the irregular, subjective and contradictory accounts that more authentically represent the formation of history.

For the Cabaret Crusades, Shawky incorporated the writing of Arab historians Usama Ibn Munqidh, Ibn al-Qalanisi and Ibn al-Athīr, and took inspiration from Amin Maalouf’s 1986 book The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, giving an Arab historical account of the context and motivation underpinning the Crusades in three extraordinary films performed by marionettes.

Drama 1882 takes place some 600 years later, in an operatic rendition of Egypt’s nationalist Urabi revolution against imperial rule. It focuses on a dramatic café-fight in Alexandria in the summer of 1882, which propelled the conflict that led to Britain’s occupation of Egypt until 1956, protecting Britain’s many interests, including investment tied up in the Suez Canal. Produced in an historic theatre in Alexandria, with a vibrant set design, stunning libretto and score, and shown at a time of widening historical reckoning for former colonial empires, Drama 1882 premieres in the UK as blood continues to be shed in the Middle East, stories are revised and accounts changed, calling into question the very idea of truth.

Shawky reflects on his use of marionettes, with many of the Murano glass marionettes created in collaboration with Venetian glassblowers shown for the first time in the UK at Talbot Rice Gallery, alongside Cabaret Crusades III: The Secrets of Karbala. Continuing his ‘non-dramatic’ storytelling from the animation of puppets through to the stilted, wooden movements of the human performers in Drama 1882, he says “we are all like marionettes, manipulated by forces we cannot see.”

By presenting two of Shawky’s large-scale film productions together, the UK premiere of his incisive Drama 1882, numerous glass marionettes and sculptures (many of which have featured in his films), alongside drawings and items selected by Shawky from Islamic and Byzantine collections of the University of Edinburgh, the exhibition will celebrate an extraordinary artist. It will also honour the Byzantine and Islamic Art Historian David Talbot Rice, in whose memory Talbot Rice Gallery was named when it opened in the University of Edinburgh 50 years ago. The exhibition of Wael Shawky hails the dawn of the next 50 years of Talbot Rice Gallery’s future – a university gallery that is part of a global discourse about art and the world we live in, and determined to unearth histories and share stories of the world around us by artists who help us to stretch the human imagination.

Curated by Director, Prof Tessa Giblin.