Curator Nadine Abdel Ghaffar’s decision to stage this exhibition in the newly reopened Manial Palace is a clever historicizing gesture. Built in the early twentieth century under the watchful eye of Prince Mohammed Ali Tewfik, the palace is a sumptuous mélange of stylistic influences ranging from Rococo and Art Nouveau to Ottoman and Persian. A horror vacui that is both awe-inspiring and disorienting in its anachronist appropriation, the palace proves an arresting environment for a take on the modern Egyptian canon.

Ghaffar includes members of the old guard of Egypt’s fine arts community like the sculptor Ahmed Askalany, whose The Prayers, 2018, dominates a tiny prayer niche replete with ornate wooden reliefs and patterned rugs. Two vaguely humanoid forms, rustled up with coils of coarse ropey textiles, bow toward one another like a pair of mummified parenthesis. The work is striking for its contrast with its kaleidoscopic surroundings. Representing a younger generation of Egyptian artists, Yasmine El Meleegy shows Rites Of Passage, 2016–18, a set of small and intimately scaled objects rendered in wax—a doll’s hand, a pillow—that also play foil to the chaotic lusciousness of the palace grounds.

The most impressive work of the show is by Shady El Noshokaty, a midcareer artist whose work bridges the veteran modernists like Askalany and the youthful experimentation of El Meleegy. His COLONY – Sounds of the Seven Tears, 2018, is a symphony in glass that engages with the stained-glass windows and ornate metal work of its palatial setting. Myriad polychromatic, translucent forms—some biomorphic and slug-like, others like an arsenal of luminescent spears, and, strangest of all, a family of purple diaphanous rats—rest on reflective glass tables in Tewfik’s maximalist alcázar like a laboratory abandoned by extraterrestrials. The installation reflects and distorts the room’s already garish lighting in a kitsch sci-fi vision, pointing toward a bizarre future as Askalany’s decidedly mid-twentieth century modernism defines Egyptian art’s past.

— Dan Jakubowski